Ivy Roots

Ivy Roots
“Ivy Roots” — Intertwined ivy roots draping across a concrete retaining wall.

I have walked past this place scores of times — it is along one of my regular walks. I walk almost daily, often along one of a group of familiar routes. It had been weeks since I last did this one, so it was time again to visit it. As I walked along a creek and past some commercial buildings I “saw” something that I have certainly seen before, but not really noticed — a great wall of ivy roots stretched across concrete.

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Autumn Trees, Canyon Wall

Autumn Trees, Canyon Wall
“Autumn Trees, Canyon Wall” — A small grove of autumn cottonwood trees next to the wall of a Utah canyon.

A few years ago three of us explored a long section of narrow canyon in Utah, looking for photographs in this rich landscape. We started in a broad valley where a stream flowed between low hills, but soon the walls rose and steepened and the valley narrowed, and we found ourselves following a creek. The canyon was alternately wide and then narrow and constricted.

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Imaginary Landscape — Brown

Imaginary Landscape — Brown
“Imaginary Landscape — Brown” — An imaginary landscape based on materials from the desert.

This imaginary landscape — an image produced by manipulating photographic materials — riffs on the subject of playa mud. Here the semi-circular forms in the lower 2/3 of the frame interested me, obviously along with the shapes and textures of the dried mud.

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Aeolian Bedforms

Aeolian Bedforms
“Aeolian Bedforms” — Wind-caused ripples in desert sand dunes, Death Valley.

This is probably the classic notion of what a desert looks like — fields of wind-formed sand dunes stretching into the distance. In truth, such dunes typically cover only a very small fraction of the desert landscape. That’s certainly true in Death Valley National Park, where large, impressive dunes are only found in a handful of locations. We visited one of them on the final morning of our late February trip.

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