Drifting Dunes

“Just as the sand-dunes, heaped one upon another, hide each the first, so in life the former deeds are quickly hidden by those that follow after.”
Marcus Aurelius

Drifting Dunes was my forgotten image. Soon after making it, I dismissed it as a failure, and the negatives were deeply buried as my archives grew.

The problem, as I saw it, was my decision to overlap the compositions of the individual exposures, a departure from my established practice. I thought to make a seamless 360-degree image that would be fully immersive. Yet when I made a set of contact prints and laid them end to end, I could see the overlap took me away from the full-frame aesthetic I inherited from Henri Cartier-Bresson. Intuition led me to forget the whole idea.

Before giving up on it, I trimmed the edges of the contacts, taped them together, and framed the piece for my mother. She loved it.

More than thirty years passed, and when, like a lost artifact, the framed piece my mother had loved surfaced again, I had completely forgotten it. I wondered why. The negatives were not where I expected to find them. I had to dig. The more I dug, the more I despaired they were truly lost.

When finally I found them, I scanned them immediately and placed them end to end in Photoshop. I began to remember all I had forgotten about this image.

Henri Cartier-Bresson had a considerable impact on me as a developing photographer. The full frame aesthetic is a statement that the image was composed in the camera, no cropping in the darkroom. Spread across a series of large format negatives, the aesthetic seemed an expression of exemplary technical precision, a process mastered. An ego statement.

Much changed while Drifting Dunes lay hidden. I no longer make contact prints in a darkroom. My ego no longer needs to make a statement about process. I now recognize this image as a touchstone, not a failure.

This was the first time I composed an image across so many sheets of film. This image taught me that the immersion I sought needed to be my own into my art.

“How do you make your pictures?
I don’t know, it’s not important.”
Henri Cartier-Bresson