Extreme Duality

On the rare occasions when a blanket of deep snow settles on Joshua Tree, the landscape–known for its searing temperatures–sits in complete contrast with the one in our collective conscience.

The towering trees of Lady Bird Johnson Grove have the ability to withstand fires and drought, but when fog hangs among their towering frames, the take on the most ethereal appearance.

Some days it feels like the more frantic the elements become, the more resolute the rocks stand in defiance.

It was late December, and Yosemite Valley was bitingly cold. The setting sun glittered on the granite walls before me, but I stood in their blue afternoon shade. A shiver rippled through me as I framed up my composition. In the foreground, a group of bare cottonwood skeletons stood in stark contrast to the snowy meadow. In the distance, Half Dome arced above them. I pointed my camera at one of the most iconic landscapes on the planet, but I wasn’t feeling it. 

I was frustrated. I had planned my day around this shoot, waited until golden hour, and taken care to compose the scene using all the traditional best practices, but something wasn’t working. I took a step back to think about what was wrong, and that’s when I noticed the clouds sinking onto the rock around Upper Yosemite Falls. Layers of complex weather brought motion to the acutely frozen granite walls while the mist softened their edges. The scene was mainly in the shade, except for some diffused light around the torrential flow of water. I turned my camera around and created an image I was infinitely happier with.

Later that night, I looked at the back of my camera and contemplated the day’s photography. I was, of course, delighted with my reactive image of Yosemite Falls, but I was still frustrated by my attempt to photograph Half Dome. I did everything the experts recommended to manufacture a ‘beautiful’ image. Still, it didn’t compare to the darker, more intimidating, and opportunistic photo. The difference was intangible and personal, and if I wanted to create more meaningful and expressive images, I had to understand why one image meant more to me than the other.

Over the next year or so, I consciously tried to find my voice as a photographer, but the process was more challenging than expected. Photographers love to review equipment and explain the finer points of exposure, but they’re not as forthcoming with how to express yourself as an artist, and I didn’t even know what I wanted to say. So, I began looking to one of the masters of the medium for answers: Ansel Adams.

Ansel Adams is renowned for his pioneering and iconic black-and-white landscape photography. His technical prowess made him an expert at capturing light, contrast, and texture for visual impact. More importantly, however, he knew how to harness these skills for self-expression. His subject matter was typically the natural world, with California—and Yosemite in particular—a focus, and he often used dramatic lighting conditions, such as the interplay of sunlight and storm clouds or the ethereal glow of sunrise, to evoke powerful moods and a range of emotions. 

Ever since I’d moved to California, I’d been chasing something with my photography. I found myself focusing exclusively on the natural world, and I’d worked hard to improve my technical skills. Both pursuits gave me purpose, but I wanted to put something of myself into the images, and that’s where I felt stuck. As I continued to study Ansel Adams, one of his notable quotes said, “I believe one must live in a region for a considerable time and absorb its character and spirit before the work can truly reflect the experience of the place.” 

When I examined my motivations, I realized I was driven by the need to build a relationship with the place I lived through photography. The more I explored, studied the details, and familiarized myself with the environment, the stronger my relationship with the place became. As I wrestled with my sense of belonging, my roots scratching at the surface of this place, my photography found a deeper purpose. But the question remained, how do I express that visually?

Adams preferred the term ‘making’ a picture to ‘shooting’ or’ taking’ one because it signified intentionality in the creative process. I took that to heart and started to adjust my perspective. Traditional landscape photographs often depict grand vistas and epic scenery, but I found myself trying to get closer to the details. I often positioned myself and the camera low to the ground to build intimacy with the land. It allowed me to feel its textures and fill my senses, but it also forced a sense of depth into the frame, emphasizing that I still didn’t feel quite at home. It was progress, but something was still missing.

Ansel Adams felt he’d fulfilled his creative vision and truly expressed himself for the first time when he created Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, in 1927. He used a red filter to darken the sky while selecting a perspective that accentuated the height of the sheer rock face. His image wasn’t predictable or serene; it was imposing and intimidating. When I compared it to my image of Half Dome, the lack of emotion in mine struck me like an avalanche. Conversely, my image of Yosemite Falls was filled with dark moods and turmoil, and I realized that was why it resonated with me.

Sometime later, I was attempting to make an image for a local photography competition. I was assigned the category’ black and white.’ While I saw an opportunity to express myself, the process was arduous. For my first attempt, I tried to capture the sunset from Mount Tamalpais, but the light was surprisingly flat, and I didn’t feel inspired. The following day, I climbed down the steep bluffs to Black Sands Beach in the Marin Headlands. The coast was deserted, clouds swept across the sky, and jagged rocks punctured the horizon. Here was a tempestuous scene that intrigued me. 

I found a composition that brought the elements together and positioned the camera upside down on an inverted tripod head to get close to the sand. I tried to make a long exposure to capture the motion in the sea and the sky, but the tide was coming in fast. Every time I released the shutter, a wave would surge up the beach and threaten to snatch my camera. Finally, after a few lucky escapes and with a pair of jeans drenched to the waist, I gave up for the evening.

In a final, desperate attempt, I returned to Black Sands Beach the following evening. The conditions were similar to the previous day, and the beach was deserted again. While waiting for the light, I sat on a rock and let my mind wander. I couldn’t pinpoint an exact emotion, but I still felt ungrounded. Time seemed to be moving too fast, and even with a neutral density filter, I could do nothing to slow it. As the light improved, my mood remained overcast. When I finally released the shutter, I created an image reflecting my feelings. It wasn’t what I’d have called beautiful in the traditional sense, but just like my image of Yosemite Falls, it had emotion. A few weeks later, that image took first place in the competition, and I felt validation in my path.

With renewed energy, I started to find additional inspiration in new places. The first was in the work of Edward Hopper. Hopper is regarded as one of America’s most prominent 20th-century painters. Like Adams (or many artists, for that matter), he manipulated light, often using strong contrasts between light and shadow to accentuate the atmosphere or to convey specific emotions. More specifically, his characters seemed to exist in their self-contained worlds, separated from their surroundings. As such, his work often gave a deep sense of introspection and isolation. 

The longer I stared at Hopper’s paintings, the more I related to them. I loved California and exploring the natural world, but if I was honest with myself, I’d felt relatively lonely since moving there. My personal relationships were fractured, and I was far removed from everything I had previously known. Being alone in nature forced me to face the fact that, even as an introvert, I struggled with isolation and shallow roots. When I realized those emotions were evident in my images of Yosemite Falls and Black Sands Beach, they felt more personal. It was a strange realization that I was finding self-expression in my photography, but they were emotions I hadn’t been honest with myself about. At least I understood where they were coming from.

My next point of inspiration was The Revenant, an epic movie directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. Set in the 19th century, against a backdrop of American wilderness, nature itself is an overwhelming presence in the film. It’s shot almost exclusively with natural light, producing an enveloping experience and a sense of realism that I’d never felt before in a movie theatre. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki said, “We wanted to make a movie that was immersive and visceral. The idea of using natural light came because we wanted the audience to feel, I hope, that this stuff is really happening.” His accomplishment justly won him an Oscar, and it played an outsized role in how I felt about the landscape: stunningly beautiful but raw, brutal, and unforgiving in equal measure. 

For a while, I wrestled with my competing feelings about our wild spaces. Of course, I wanted to celebrate the natural beauty and wonder of the places I explored, but equally, they brought out more complex feelings about isolation and loneliness. For a long time, I felt like I had to pick a lane, but when I saw the way natural light and wilderness illuminated the entire human experience in The Revenant, it made me realize complexity wasn’t only possible but essential in expressing myself.

An issue of National Geographic inspired the final piece of the puzzle. In an article titled, Can the Selfie Generation Unplug and Get Into Parks?, Timothy Egan described a conversation with Jonathan Jarvis, the director of the National Park Service. They discussed a group of inner-city kids looking at an iconic photo of Grand Teton National Park, “bathed in glorious evening light,” but they thought the vision was “scary … Empty. Forbidding. Not welcoming.” Similarly, they brought a group of students from Los Angeles to Death Valley. “They wouldn’t get out of the van.” Jarvis explained, “The quiet, the pure darkness, unnerved them and threatened them.” 

I inherently knew that two people could feel dramatically opposing ways about the same thing, and even that one person could have competing emotions; I’d already established that I did. But, realizing my chosen subject matter was infused with an underlying tension, I began to understand how well-suited it was to self-expression. And, once I began to look for it, I found duality everywhere: in the transition from night to day, in the motion around fixed points, or in the ecotones where two biological communities met. I found that duality was something to explore and celebrate in those places where we disconnect to reconnect.

As fall came around, I wandered through Lady Bird Johnson Grove in Redwoods National Park. I say wandered because there’s really no other way to move through the coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) forest, constantly looking up at the giant trunks disappearing into the nourishing fog. A silence hung in the branches, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had traveled back in time. I planned to photograph the redwoods, but after my journey of self-discovery, I approached the scene with intentionality. The towering trees were so large and resolute—capable of withstanding fires and drought—yet, when the mist drifted through their limbs, softening the light and obscuring the depth of field, they took on an ethereal, ghostly appearance. Duality, again. 

The image I made that day—vertical to emphasize the height of the tree trunks—was the final image I needed for a solo photography show. That winter, the Mill Valley Arts Commission hung fifteen of my pictures in the City Hall. Looking at the prints hanging together, including the image of Yosemite Falls that started it all, I felt incredibly proud. Each image expressed something I wanted to say while sharing a common theme: extreme duality. I supplied the following description of the collection… 

Our wilderness represents an extreme duality in perceptions. There’s tension in the very idea of public lands, but in this always-connected age, there’s a deepening emotional divide in how humans experience nature. For some, these are beautiful, ecologically essential spaces; to others, they are forbidding, desolate expanses. This black-and-white Californian landscape collection, titled Extreme Duality, explores that balance.