Spring road trip
I needed to see the sky
I found some other things along the way.
Throwback
Missing water
The days of water seem far away. From one extreme to the other – the wettest place I ever lived to the driest. Surely there is a happy medium somewhere.
Winter solstice 2022
Another spin around the sun, and the light returns as promised.
May 2023 be a spectacular year full of joy and satisfaction.
Thanks for sharing the journey with me. xoxo T
Doors with opposing handles
Roadside bar reimagined
Standard Oil Products
The Pipeline Fire
Badgers!
Sheep Mountain View
Shelf cloud rolls ahead of the rain
Oh, yeah, Namibia boys
It’s a long walk
New Mexico from 12,000 feet
A view of the pond from the house I can’t find again.
Things you find in the desert
The desert always holds the unexpected.
A coal, oil, lumber train lumbering through sage and creosote.
Great blue herons wading through a still Rio Grande channel surrounded by autumn cattails and reflected in rain-muddied water.
A fall watercolor of saltgrass to sage, sage to willow, willow to cottonwood, the details of texture and color fuzzy, delicately bleeding onto the page.
Subtlety is an art form.
Slow assimilation
It has been a long slide from Africa to October – at least the length of a giraffe’s neck.
A few photos to stem the tide… I won’t promise soon, but sometime, there will be more for you here.
In the meantime, a little scale…
Red dust retreating
Africa in retrospect
My gear is mostly clean and stored now. A substantive layer of red grit has been rinsed from the bathtub after scrubbing boots, duffel, and backpack. I am getting used to the sun being in the southern sky again. My hands no longer look like worn stone and I seem to have finally lost the sand in my teeth after face-planting on the downslope of the famous red dunes. This was not an easy trip, long days, difficult roads, heat, cold, wind, and dust.
What’s the difference between this and fieldwork in New Mexico?
Space, time. People. Attitudes. Beliefs. Distances, geographic and human. Colors. Textures. The light. Elephants. Hyenas and lions.
My camera stopped working early in the trip. Although disappointed and frustrated by the sudden lack of this visual extension of myself, it gave me permission to see. Instead of looking quickly and then taking photos, I watched the landscape; I observed the animals. I saw more and saw it more viscerally. I picked up my cell phone to take a photo and realized the futility of trying to capture something so distant and obscured, or so intimate and detailed, and put it down again. Slowly shifting away from the thought that poor resolution was better than none.
I have much to process, the photos I did take with my camera and phone, and the images my head holds. These latter are somewhat out of order and are filtered through a light I can’t recreate on a different continent, with colors faded and intimacy lost.
Here are a few landscapes from South Africa and Namibia before the camera quit.
More to come. Stay tuned.
