Badlands Detail. © Copyright 2022 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A small, deeply eroded gully cuts through badlands terrain, Death Valley National Park.

You may have noticed that few of my photographs from Death Valley feature the usual iconic subjects. Perhaps an explanation is in order. There’s nothing at all wrong with photographing those famous subjects — as someone once said, “There’s a reason they are icons!” I photograph them, too, when the conditions are special or unusual. In the right conditions you might even find me lined up at Zabriskie Point at dawn! (Though these days, if I photograph that subject, it is more likely to be in the middle of the day or perhaps at night. That’s a long story — too long for this short post.)

These days much of my photography in the park falls into a few basic categories. There are some photographs that I have had in mind for a long time that still haven’t quite come together the way I want, and I return to these subjects regularly and continue to work on them. I’m also very interested in pushing out the boundaries of my relationship to this landscape, and on every visit I got to places that I have not visited before. Another approach that has come to interest me more and more here is to excerpt small bits of the larger landscape and treat them as the subject. (I believe that sometimes a close look at a fragment of the landscape can tell us more about it than a photograph that tries to “include it all.”) This photograph falls into the latter category — this little ravine is high on a hill in a place where, I’d wager, most people probably don’t even notice it. But at the right moment in the right light it becomes something special.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.

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