1995 | Panamint Basin
There is no such thing as nothing.
If it can be named, it is there.
On a map, this basin looks empty. Some people might think that nothing is there, that nothing is going on.
But here is substantial evidence that what they call ‘empty’ is full of light.
What might be my best silver print was made from this negative. For those of you who missed the grand darkroom era of photography, the high and low ends of the tonal scale were always the most difficult to judge when printing – inspecting a wet print, we could marvel at the rich variations of dark and darker grays, and appreciate separations in the barest deposits of silver representing the lightest values. But as our prints dried, and the gelatin emulsion suspending the sparkling silver shrank, the sonorous dark values closed up and the celestial highlights would settle down into everydayness.
For this print, I exposed less and less for each trial, pushing for a lighter and lighter result, getting ahead of the ‘dry-down.’ I was still disappointed with the heaviness of the critical brilliance. On another day, I boldly started with half of the previous exposure (an enormously crude adjustment) and worked toward even less. Then, drying slowly on a mesh screen in quiet air, the print came home.