Why do I make photographs? Hmm. Tough one.
The great American photographer Edward Weston said he started to photograph because of an “amazement at subject matter”. My own fascination with landscape photography emerged from a want to document the beauty I saw within landscapes I visited.
The beauty that is the sublime sandstone arch sitting on the canyon precipice it’s position aligned with the morning sun to illuminate its underside each morning. Or the slot canyon punctured by light beams on certain months, at a certain time. All seeming providence, to have intention and design yet being nothing more than a totally random occurence of geology.
A patient artist, nature takes years, millennia even, in carefully crafting her works through the subtle near invisible tools of wind and water. Her giant creations, her canyons, arches, sea stacks and slots stand for eons outside of any human frame of reference when it comes to the passage of time. Our lives like the mayfly, to brief to really discern the passage of her hand changing their form.
What we can see, and what fascinates me most, is the fleeting interplay of light against these immortal structures. The ethereal light can completely change a landscape in an instant, give it mood, depth, or enhance that one characteristic that makes it beautiful and unique, only to disappear in an instant.
Being there at that time, hunting those moments out. Bearing witness to nature’s creations. That’s why I love landscape photography.
Paul