101 | What's There

2013 | Descanso Gardens, La Cañada, California

2013 | Descanso Gardens, La Cañada, California

Tod Papageorge wrote long ago that “cameras are like dogs, but dumb, and toward quarry, even more faithful.”

The modest but extraordinary lens I used here was reviewed by some writers as being too sharp. For me, that’s a strange complaint. If that’s indeed their case, it’s left to the rest of us to take advantage of the lens character. I’ll just let the camera follow its nose, since it may be sharper than my eye.

*Tod’s full essay is in Aperture, June, 1974, “The Snapshot” issue. (quote corrected by DW 2021-04-30)

**The Leica Elmarit-M 28mm f2.8 Aspheric is not fast, just blazing. It is astoundingly rectilinear, and sometimes you just can’t tell how wide it is. For me, it draws the scene ‘normally,’ and plenty of it.

100 | Aspens

1989 | Garfield County, Utah

1989 | Garfield County, Utah

My father, born in 1921, almost 100 years ago now, was an irrepressible explorer. Around 1938, his aunts, not drivers, had bought a car and asked him if he would drive them from Los Angeles to visit the East Coast relatives. What teenager would not jump!

Ever since, he had stayed off the four-lanes, taken farm roads, branched off, driven through unlocked gates, and never intended to return by the same way he had gone out.

So in the year of this picture, when I was deep into my own adulthood, Dad suggested that I hop on a plane to meet him in Las Vegas to drive out for another look at Capitol Reef, the last national park he had only recently discovered for himself. But now as an adult, though still not as tall, I was able to ask him to stop here near Panguitch, long enough to set up my view camera.

After all those trips as children, asking Mom and Dad, “When are we gonna get there?” — we made it.

98 | Highest Use

2015 | Marin County, California

2015 | Marin County, California

At this spot, throughout the year, most days you can hear the surf shore-breaking five miles away on a steep and straight ten-mile beach, spending energy gathered on a fetch of two thousand miles counted from the Aleutians. Here, on the other side of the ridge and above the inlet, it is quiet otherwise.

For me, everything slows down, warms up, and I can get to work. My first thought, after spontaneously making this picture, was “This is the best use of an old sailboat.” But now, thirty-two years later, I am thinking, “I wonder what happened to the rest of that boat?”

94 | Blackwell's Corner

2005 | Lost Hills, California

2005 | Lost Hills, California

I’m not much for celebrity photographs, so I am skeptical when I see larger-than-life representations of people. (I have photographed Mount Rushmore, though.)

But this memorial to James Dean holds my attention, and on a perfect San Joaquin Valley day, I found other ways to admire this small monument near the place where his creative short life came to a sudden end.