Rain.

Rio Puerco valley near Cabezon.

The Sandias watch over Albuquerque through mists of snow and rain.

The cold of winter appears endless when, overnight timid grass grows. I always miss the season that just passes.

A tribute to those frigid days.

One of my favorite photographs is one by an excellent early New Mexico photographer, Lee Marmon. It is Girls at Clothesline, 1954. With two girls hanging up laundry on a clothesline, the setting is simple. The tones are breathtaking and the moment is timeless. I never thought it was possible for me to like this photo more. And then I read a poem by Joy Harjo that accompanied the photograph in the book, Pueblo Imagination (a fantastic book of some of Lee’s great New Mexico photos). This poem has haunted me from the moment I read it. It is so perfectly New Mexico, and yet the rythms of life bridge both time and location. Since reading this poem, I have trained my eye to look for those rythms.

In taking this photograph I was moved by the adobe melting back into the earth. I wondered at the lives that had lived in the dusty village of Guadalupe, NM. The bright days of harvest and happinness. Life. Beautiful colors. All of that history has melted and blown away in the fine sand of the Puerco valley. And now it is the dark, moody cycle of decay. It felt so dead. So final.

It is but a moment.

Another fall arrives, another balloon fiesta passes. I love the balloon fiesta’s light atmosphere. It is one of the few events in Albuquerque where most attendees are genuinely happy. Smiles and yawns, steaming food and brisk autumn air, the cold black of night chased as the morning sun slowly warms over the field. On this day, that beautiful sun spilled through the crowds dowsing everything in a warm glow.

Here the balloon crews work to fill the balloon with enough hot air to get it upright, the flames right at home amidst the fiery glow of morning light.

Nature is boundless in its ability to impress me. If a person were to pass near a high mountain view and appreciate everything it had to offer, another person arriving hours, if not minutes, later would view something similar, but never the same. The fall of light, the atmospheric components of dust and water in the air, the mood of the setting. Different times of day produce different opportunities for observing nature’s limitless beauty. On a backpacking trip in the Pecos Wilderness, the dew on pine needles of another early mountain morning greeted me simply. The everyday scene of pine needles transformed by soft early morning light, and wonderful droplets of dew clinging to needles was so fresh, clean, and fantastically beautiful.

I have tried for years to capture Cabezon Peak appropriately. It’s prominent shape stands out among other cinder cones in the Rio Puerco valley east of Mount Taylor and I always feel drawn to its brooding mass. The Navajo’s explain that it is the remains of a giant killed by the gods, its defeated head still rising up from the earth. The spaniards dubbed it Cabezon, meaning ’big head’ in spanish, but it could also be taken to mean closer to ’stubborn’.

I have driven past this monolith for years and have seen it just over the horizon on clear days while living and driving around Albuquerque. It seems to cast its own presence; an ominous and moody lump of basalt, almost gazing out from under a heavy brow. Photographically, this rock has mocked me. The dark black basalt seems to soak up all light that touches it, causing the mass to appear ‘tasteless’ when photographed. Most photos I have made appear lifeless and boring, never doing justice to the feel of this monument that has so much life. And then on a particular afternoon, the monsoon clouds build and roil over its head, trailing sheets of rain. For a brief moment, clouds and light align and Cabezon smiles at me.

A giant defeated by gods, or just a big head, I see something hard headed. Stubborn. Lasting. Beautiful.

For a place so arid and so empty, so hot and so cold, so ragged and so beautiful, there is rich history near Gallup. Standing at the top of a mesa near an archeological site on Ft. Wingate, the igloos that (at two seperate times) housed the most munitions in the world lay out in formation. Standing here thinking of the old Army Depot and how it will soon fade into history, I feel an odd sense of loss. I can feel the hundreds of lives that worked and lived on this base. Lives of happiness, depression, anger, elation, hope. Mixing with those lives is a realization that others had lived here before, a fact that shouts loudly from the ground and it’s pottery shard flecked surface at my feet. And behind all of this in the photo, timeless geological formations of the Pyramid and Church Rock look on.

Fairly simple and delivered in black and white to eliminate distractions, I love the many themes in this photo. Find your meaning.

At the old Fort Wingate Army Depot, a row of Poplars stand in a row, bending in the wind, seeming to lean away from the Pyramid, a geologic formation in the back ground. I had watched these tall trees sway and wave for days, nearly asking me to take a picture of them. In honor of earth day, here they stand amidst a harsh climate nearly void of any tree taller than five feet.

Grow tall.

I love contrast in photos. The more photos I take, the more I appreciate subtle contrast. Not the kind of contrast one adjusts with the slider bar in Photoshop, but that emotional contrast of life and death, permanance and frailty, glassy smooth and gritty rough, lines and curves; all found in nature. I also enjoy when photos draw me to different conclusions. When I took this photo I could not decide whether the live tree would be sad, afraid or completely indifferent if it had human emotions.

Today, I see a pensive worry about the future.