Monument Valley
A collection of film and digital images from my travels across the "Four Corners" of the American Southwest including New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado as well as a couple from Nevada. I was introduced to the absolutely magnificent landscape of the southwest when I enrolled in an alternative processes photography course that took me and seven other students across the four corners of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado for an entire month of driving cross-country, camping, hiking and exploring various photographic processes. I am incredibly thankful that Jackie Kerns Heigle, Associate Professor in the Photography Department at Middle Tennessee State University, took the time and energy to organize the class, and even host us in her beautiful home in Santa Fe, NM.
There is something particularly enchanting about the southwest. The sun carves deep, contrasting shadows on every rock, tree and highway illuminating texture and time. The stars at night hang low and bright. I recall arriving to Chaco Canyon in New Mexico at dusk. The stars came out just as we were putting final touches on our campsite. I have never felt so close to the heavens, as if I could catch a star in my hand. It brought me to tears. A couple weeks later, we arrived in Silverton, Colorado where we trekked across small patches of ice and snow in our shorts and Chacos to explore the distressed wood and chipped paint of the old mines. There is an abundance of color, light and history to discover. I have visited the west three times and counting.
““It is all very beautiful and magical here — a quality which cannot be described. You have to live it and breathe it, let the sun bake it into you. The skies and land are so enormous, and the detail so precise and exquisite that wherever you are you are isolated in a glowing world between the macro and the micro, where everything is sidewise under you and over you, and the clocks stopped long ago.”
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