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Artist Statement
My photo Desert Sunset was shot in a very flat region of northern Arizona not far from Monument Valley, where a subtly interrupted horizon is visible in all directions. Here, the stillness seems to implode one’s hearing, such that footsteps or clapping or calling out will yield no resonance. The deep red ground is spattered with random rock mound formations, while the variegated clouds appear to mimic those patterns in the vast open sky. The vibrancy of colors at sunset is hypnotic, enticing one to linger while it grows and recedes until nothing remains but a gray pall fading to complete darkness, and infinite sparkling stars emerge to fill the endless void above and beyond the horizon.
These are my reflections on the experience — while I was there, neither words nor thoughts were foremost in my conscious mind; a feeling of pure expanse and desolation accompanied the brilliant sky which was the focus of my attention. My only thought process was the capturing of it onto film, which required two separate exposures: one for the land and one for the sky, because the brightness differential between them was too great. Therefore, I later had to extract and composite together the land and sky segments from digital scans of the two film negatives. |
