Introduction
It would not be an exaggeration to say that this project started over twenty years ago. My fascination with powerful landforms, often articulated as naturally occurring monolithic structures, has been an abiding one for much of my adult life. The difference between then and now, however, is pretty stark. As a young twenty-something with a passion for mountain climbing and photography, everything looked interesting. And that’s not a pejorative statement. Everything really was interesting and exciting and new, and I was photographing all of it, every chance I got. This seldom resulted in successful images, but was a process of defining and refining my voice and vision as a young artist.
As it turns out, it took over twenty years for those early, intuitive impulses to really settle into something of real substance. There is a passage by Gary Snyder that has been important to me for a long time. In Good Wild Sacred, he says the following: “Certain places are perceived to be of high spiritual density because of plant or animal habitat intensities, or associations with legend, or connections with human totemic ancestry, or because of geomorphological anomaly, or some combination of qualities. These places are gates through which one can—it would be said—more easily enter a larger-than human, larger-than-personal, realm.”
The places I am responding to now are wild, in a powerful, mysterious, commanding way. And not wild as in wilderness (although that is sometimes the case), but wild as in scary and unknowable, while at the same time irrepressibly inviting and seductive. That kind of Wild seems to explode out of the forest floor without warning, a geologic Being that won’t be ignored. Or a Wild that has recently (by the standards of geologic time) splintered from a cliff above, coming down catastrophic and thunderous to balance itself precariously on the valley’s bottom.
These are the kinds of places that the ancients were drawn to, the kinds of places where burial sites or petroglyphs sometimes turn up. Not the standing stones of the British Isles, but naturally occurring monoliths that surprise, challenge, and sometimes almost frighten the human imagination. It is something to find a monolith that tugs at the human heart and psyche with such force. It is another task altogether to make a photograph of such a site that relays its power and mystery. But twenty-plus years on, that is just exactly what I am trying to do. And in many ways, it’s what I’ve always been trying to do.