51 | Pit No. 611

August 27, 2020 David Wing

There is a gravel quarry at the foot of Coyote Mountain just east of the little town of Borrego Springs. (The ‘springs’ are finite; golf courses, farms, and spreading developments are drawing water from a deep aquifers at four times the rate of their recharge. Hydrologists were troubled by the fact that the water samples they had drawn were 5000 years old, and it is still not known exactly how, when, and from where, the aquifer is naturally replenished.)

This pictured element is special to me since I can see geology in action – a mountain reduced to gravel, mixed with petroleum tar, to be laid down for highway repairs. Although this pile of treated gravel is the ‘blackest’ thing in the desert landscape, like any deep value, to sensitive people, it is luminous.

50 | Clark Dry Lake

August 25, 2020 David Wing

First a dry lakebed, then an aerial gunnery range during the Second World War, this topography was a dream layout for radio astronomers seeking a ‘flat’ plane closely matching the curvature of the earth. This particular place even had gently eroded edges, which gave an opportunity to build an extended antenna system optimally equidistant from the center of our planet.

So it caught the eye of Convair (later General Dynamics) which built a preliminary array for studying radiation from the stars and planets. Later, the University of Maryland acquired the site and constructed a new two-mile-long T-shaped array of some seven hundred conical spiral antennas, and it was bringing in significant new data by the early 1970’s.

San Diego has been advantageous for research into the heavens; this site is just 60 miles northeast of that city and 35 miles east of Mt. Palomar, with its splendid 200-inch telescope. It has been a good place from which to look out, and to listen in.

Not long after I made this picture of these remnants of the Clark Lake facility, the last vestiges of the antenna array were removed and the lakebed became a dry camp and off-road attraction. I do remember a University of Maryland story describing the recruiting process for attracting grad students to work at this desolate facility: “Hey, who would like to spend the summer in California?”

49 | Dawn Redwood | 水杉

August 20, 2020 David Wing

This species had been known only to paleobotanists as a Mesozoic fossil dating back 150,000,000 years. In the 1940’s it was found alive and well in a remote valley in China. Shortly after its identification as a discrete species, seeds were collected under a small grant from Harvard’s arboretum and these were shared among the botanical community.

A fast grower, the dawn redwood is now revered by many; this specimen was planted in a place of advantage around 1955. I came to know it later and have been a faithful witness to half its life. Trees of all ages have been lost to human pride, but this one survives in spite of brittle upslope Bishop pines dropping all around it. And it has not suffered the worst – impatient property owners assess these trees’ brown needles in the fall, consider them diseased, and take them down. Anyone who recognizes the characteristic spiral bark pattern would want to jump in front of that saw.

Metasequoia glyptostroboides is deciduous.

48 | Buckeyes

August 18, 2020 David Wing

We are favored in California with forests along our striking coastline and the high running range of the Sierra Nevada. In spite of the existential threats of development and accelerated climate change, it is often a simple matter to step out of the modern world into the time and space of trees.

In every tree, growth and evolved structure are obvious, and individual adaptation to soil, slope, moisture, light, and neighbors is a true story. In a forest or grove, tree heritage, community, are culture are right in front of – and all around – me.

Among trees, I appreciate strangers as much as old friends. This picture was made in a familiar place, but every one I have made here over the years has been different. When I stop looking too hard, I can sometimes take in the spirit of this place, with the bundled memories of present and previous inhabitants from the entire spectrum of life. Here, it seems possible to see the forest and the trees.

Making a picture here is a special challenge. Even on days of flat overcast, it is difficult to get my lens to see well. During the day, even with heavy overcast, it’s too harsh for a quiet conversation here. So I come long after sunset, well into astronomical twilight, when the sky sifts down softly. Then, my camera can bring me the round softness of this place, at a time when its character is open and touchable.

47 | More Alders

August 13, 2020 David Wing

2007 | Tomales Bay, Marin County, California

I have admired this view for many years, but only out of the corner of my eye. The drive along this shoreline demands technical attention; the road is narrow and winding, bringing frequent encounters with deer, cyclists, big dairy tankers, and heavy hay rigs.

This route works along the bay, gently at this spot, and later hangs on the bluffside, higher above the water, with narrow shoulders, no guardrails, and little room for errors. The landscape here is discreetly dramatic and sharply drawn – after all, this bay is the water-filled section of the San Andreas Fault cutting into California from the floor of the Pacific. (Nearby on the levee road is the spot where the roadway was dislocated by its full twenty-foot width in the San Francisco quake of 1906.)

And just north of here, at age 92, my mother had her last driving experience, even as the family was planning for her to surrender the keys to the old Volvo. Before that could be arranged, Mom was on her way home from appointments over the hill. She noted her drowsiness and made a plan to turn in at the first known wide spot to rest before making the remaining two miles home. But fatigue caught her first, and she went off the road into a rare tiny meadow hidden below, angled into a small alder grove just above the water. A following driver saw her go off, and the first responders from the fire station across the road greeted her by name.

Mom reluctantly agreed to a ride in the ambulance and passed inspection with only bruised ribs from the deployment of the airbag. When she could comfortably laugh again, she admitted to me, “I know that I was in denial – I was pretending that I was only 88.”

46 | Alders

August 11, 2020 David Wing

Marin County by intention is one-third suburban, one-third agricultural, and one-third parkland.
The particular place shown here is in someone’s backyard. Soon after my picture was made, the individual alders in this grove were cut down in favor of more light for the nearby cabin and grading for a recreational horseshoe pit.

Later, after this property changed hands, this clearing was formalized into an English-style garden. Two winters ago, the place again began to show more of its true nature when the little stream which you can just see here at the lower right had its own way in a big storm.

I’ll have to take another look soon.

45 | Amphibian

August 6, 2020 David Wing

I climbed up here with Pat White. We like to go beyond where other hikers stop, and this is well above the usual tourist stops in a very popular oasis canyon.

I was ignoring the cool deep pool here, watching my footing on the huge tumbled boulders while working out three more points of contact for my tripod. I thought that I might as well try to photograph everything that I was seeing, including my hat; it had a place there, and I saw no point in leaving my precarious camera position to backtrack through the tight sycamores around the pool, just for moving it aside to make an ‘uninhabited’ picture. So here’s what we have for that day, a full frame.

My camera was set, and before my usual shutter check, as I listen to its timbre and timing first, I noted out of the corner of my right eye a lizard skittering down the rock face into the water. I was not as much startled as I was intrigued – I was unaware that these were swimmers. Pondering that notion, I turned back to my camera to find that my cable release was missing; it must have worked loose as I was bushwhacking to this vantage point, then slithered away. Later, I looked up the desert lizard species and learned that they can swim, but I already knew that cable releases don’t.

44 | Photography & Painting

August 4, 2020 David Wing

I have built boats and the occasional piece of furniture, and apprenticed in the construction of my first studio, detailed with surplus Fijian mahogany, floored in salvaged Peruvian walnut, ceilinged with twice-milled redwood pulled from my parents’ deck restoration, but I don’t have many pictures of those efforts. The attention I gave to building details and solutions, and the dust, glue, stains, and paints, weren’t compatible with keeping a camera at hand.

For me, a clear building mind is essential to consistently measure twice and cut only the wood. A mistake with a camera might mean a lost length or sheet of film, but a mistake with a saw can be something else.

Before this picture, I had commissioned an experienced painter to finish this last built-in element in the re-working of our home, jut two years after the project was ‘finished.’ This was the final detail, so I was free to think like, even be, a photographer on this day. For the first time in the long process, I got to watch work being done, and stood back for a look.

It always pays me to remain curious; across all my disciplines and enthusiasms, this seems to be my core competency.

My uncle Donn, a solid architect, started planning his next house at age ninety-two. I spoke to him recently, and he told me that he had put off the project, quoting for me the Ninety-Ninety Rule of Construction Scheduling: “90% of the job takes 90% of the time, and the last 10% takes 90% of the time.”

43 | "I don't know; let's see."

July 30, 2020 David Wing

2014 | Tillman Japanese Garden and Water Treatment Plant, Van Nuys, California

I have always been intrigued by the relation of a map to its territory.

So what do I call a picture of a map which is not the territory? How do I read it? What might be my lesson?

My camera helps me not miss at least a few of the finer details. It also helps me not to attend to too much of what I see; it guides me to see a little more of how I am seeing.

*There is a lot for me to learn from Alfred Korzybski; his lessons go far beyond dog-biscuits.

42 | Burbank

July 28, 2020 David Wing

L. A. is so broad that it feigns two dimensions. But from high places, I can still pick out the ancient Native and old padre trails tracing watercourses between the persistently dramatic Santa Monica and San Gabriel ranges.

But the broad valleys have been flattened even more by the extended leveling of modern agriculture (“Orange” County is not just a name), then blooming suburbia. The San Fernando, the San Gabriel, the Pomona, and the distant Antelope Valleys are packed in with residential development, over-scaled and often far from employment; commuting is an odious, time-consuming, and unpaid second job.

Anyone coming to the region – tourist, speculator, or environmentalist (some Angeleno families represented all three) – at any time in the past hundred years probably saw it coming, and likely would say today, “I told you so.”

But even in this picture, made on my little walk close by the temporary first campus of CalArts, the huge flat valley showed me layers, superstructures, and rigged-up connections between community shards cut adrift by marauding freeway schemes.