Size: 7.5” x 7.5” on 8.5” x 11” JonCone Studio Type 5 Paper

Signed & stamped in verso

What do you see that others do not. A scene this grand, this large and this well known requires a conversation with what you’re seeing. It requires you to stop and listen to the wind and what it whispers to you alone.

A storm was brewing from the west and rolling into the valley with pockets of sunlight piercing the scene. I had been in a somewhat dark mood all day, and the plethora of people around me just added to this intense feeling of landscape isolation. I simply saw what they refused to listen to. I was a conductor of my own little quartet, while those around me weren’t listening at all.

I loaded the film back, closed and wound the shutter, held the shutter release cable in my hand and waited, and waited, and waited. Technically I was waiting for a piercing ray of light to illuminate Bridalveil Falls and nothing else in the foreground. Poetically I was waiting for my mind to empty, for the surrounding noise to fall to the background, to enter that realm of slight insanity that is required to hear the music of the universe. And then the waterfall lit up and I clicked and held the shutter open for four minutes. Time for me stood still and like a time-lapse movie those around me sped up, moving ant-like in their haste to be always moving.

I closed the shutter after four minutes, one frame, one capture. I stayed longer, but didn’t shoot. My neighbors left and new ones moved in. It can be lonely amongst the crowd, it can also be freeing.

Location: Tunnel View, West end Yosemite Valley NP

Technical Info: Hasselblad, Ilford Delta 100 BW film, Zeiss 80mm, 4min, 10-ND, developed in Kodak X-tol 1:1