Easter

What began as a carefree vacation getaway turned into a powerfully transformative experience that led me to uproot my life.

At the outset, I knew just enough about the deserts of the American West to want to spend time there. I also knew enough about the history of photography to be convinced that the chances of making work of any original significance there were near nil. I didn't have any "serious" ambitions to make photographs that I believed would be fulfilling, beyond the pleasure of vacation photography. I've made this work for entirely selfish reasons: to remind myself of what I learned during that time. As profoundly great as the best work that preceded my own excursions is, it did not in the least diminish the thrill of seeing these places for myself. I fell in love with something infinitely huge, utterly beyond me. It was unlike anything I had ever seen. I had to photograph it, and bring those photographs to completion, with all my resources, wits and stamina. It's taken over ten years.

In retrospect, the first sign that I would abandon all reason to pursue this undertaking occurred because of the quiet. I had driven into the desert near Marathon, Texas, parked the car, and, in windless scorching late afternoon August heat, began hiking into a miles-wide arroyo. I was being pulled outward, away from the road, by little marvels: the smell of sagebrush, meandering game trails, subtleties of color and light, the promise of being closer to the hills to the west. After about thirty minutes of steady eyes-wide walking, I stopped.

Something came over me. I was alert, and still. It was silent, and I could hear... everything. A slight rustle led to the discovery of a tiny panicked lizard, thirty feet away from me, bolting across the sand. I could hear my own heartbeat. This was a capacious silence that felt infinite and alive. I stood there, stock still and relaxed, for perhaps fifteen minutes. I realized this was the first time in years since I had been outside the range of the constant whir of some kind of machinery or device powered by fossil fuel energy. The sensuality of it had a powerful effect on me. I can recall it to this present moment. I took it in, amazed and bewildered that such a seemingly small thing -the sounds of the world without industry- could be so potent. I asked myself: what else have I been missing without even knowing it? Later that night I returned to that same spot under an unusually clear, still sky to see the Milky Way as I've never seen it before or since, during the Perseid meteor shower. Again, I realized I hadn't lived this most fundamental of awesome spectacles for decades. My experience of the night sky was limited to the electric light of life in cities, which had blinded me to this sight of infinity.

The next morning, I awoke at 4 am to be able to hike to the top of a peak in Big Bend National Park in time to see the sun rise over the canyons, extinct volcanoes and plateaus that make up that fantastic place. I was euphoric. These three experiences, within fewer than 12 hours of each other, blasted the reluctance right out of me. By some measure, I went slightly crazy.

The irreparable damage industrial capitalism has done to the American West (and the entire planet) has been evident for some decades now. What's less evident is how beyond-splendid it remains.

My own discovery of the marvel of it happened for me at mid-life. My mother had died a few months before this first excursion, and I was 45 years old. I was about to crash into the fact that my life would never look the way I had imagined I might be able to shape it. The crisis of this time had little to do with aging, and everything to do with a startling realization of how little of my life was within my own means to determine. As it turned out, the remaining splendors of the American West, as they stood then, brought me to making peace with my own limitations.

For the next three years I took every opportunity I could muster to explore as much of it as I could manage. My journeys brought me face to face with some of the most potent artworks I've ever witnessed, in Horseshoe Canyon. By coincidence, without previous planning, I found myself able to visit Trinity Site, where humanity created the possibility of nuclear Armageddon by exploding the first nuclear bomb in 1945. A few hours after that, I toured the VLA Radio Telescope facility, where the black hole at the center of our galaxy was first observed. I was a tourist. But I was a tourist whose life was being changed by what he was traveling to see.

I did not avoid the National Parks or the most grand landmarks, but I found they weren't as intense as the places-between-the-places. Poison Spring Canyon, Hog Springs, the San Rafael Plateau, Ruby Lake, Duckwater, the Logan Site, Lunar Crater, Dagger Mountain and Castolon were among the locales that I found most affecting. At times I felt like I had entered another reality, where things worked a little differently from the rest of the world, and, I guess that's true. Statistics and general principles tend to pave over the freakish conspiracies random forces can cook up, where facts are as preposterous as miracles.

It's one thing to read about, for instance, the civilizations that occupied these lands before Europeans arrived. It's another entirely to hike down a 1,200 foot cliff, three miles alongside a soggy stream-bed and around a bend in Horseshoe Canyon and find yourself face to face with The Great Gallery of painted Ancestors, staring out at you with their strange round blank astonished admonishing eyes. Whoever painted them did not need to build a cathedral to inspire their faith. The whole cosmos was their cathedral. All they needed was to record their visions on a canyon wall to affirm their communion with Creation. And, they knew what they were Seeing. The logic of their faith came over me, in fits and starts, throughout my trips. I did not fall down a wormhole of new-age mystical hokum, or condescending veneration of some Caucasian idea about Noble Savages. But I did feel great sympathy for the sense of wonder, awe and affection for the Life of the places that surely informed the people who created those artworks. I felt my own version of it, and, as I photographed and explored, it grew and deepened.

I intentionally photographed what I was seeing as precisely and as simply as I could. I usually kept the camera straight and level in front of my subject. I used a type of film, combined with a special process of exposure and development, that rendered the most accurate daylight colors I knew of. I wanted to completely avoid the bizarre tendency I had seen too much of, that exaggerates this subject that is already extraordinary. The majority of photographs I've seen of the deserts in the American west are overwrought, more about novelty and cliche melodrama than the facts of the place. I sought optimal sharpness of detail. I wanted photographs that would bring home a rigorous record of these places that were filling me with such a feeling of amazement and wonder.

After each trip I returned to my life in Brooklyn, where I worked as a low-end editorial photographer and a high end print technician, exhilarated and renewed. As soon as possible I would work late into the nights and weekends carefully making proofs of what I shot. The few times I was naive and caught up enough in what I was doing to show an image or two to my colleagues, the pictures were met with indifference, at best. Sometimes I could feel a kind of sarcastic rolling of eyes when people saw what I was doing. I could sense them thinking, "Oh. Another middle aged photographer dude who takes cornball pictures of the American West." I knew that would happen, but sometimes I couldn't help myself. Before long I knew to keep it a secret.

Meanwhile, what I did for a living felt increasingly absurd. Even the most ambitious photography I was seeing (and sometimes trying to do) that was being taken seriously looked more and more ridiculous, beside the point. I read the wrenching, alarming news about the environmental crisis that has spawned the use of the term "Anthropocene" and saw a direct connection between advertising money and the rotting carcasses of whales that were washing up on beaches with increasing frequency. The art in the galleries seemed more and more decadent and solipsistic to me. My social life consisted of entirely too much shallow hedonism. My landlord was raising the rent by thousands of dollars per year. My prospects for moving up in the echelons of working photographers under such conditions had evaporated. The one romantic relationship that mattered to me turned ugly, failed miserably and shattered what was left of my hope to find a lifetime companion. I hit absolute bottom. It became more and more difficult to find the will to find jobs.

I returned to the desert in the middle of this personal collapse, a savage depression dragging along with me. I was sleeping about three fitful hours per night. Over the first three days of that second trip, I felt the same connection with that cosmic quiet and startling beauty that I had felt the first time, but I couldn't shake a sense of pointlessness in what I was doing that the skepticism my Brooklyn life hammered into me. Finally, after three days, I crawled out of bed in a shabby motel room in the middle of Utah, feeling like I should just give up, go home, "grow up" and find a way to reconcile with my limited professional options. I forced myself to eat a meager breakfast, organize my filmholders and equipment, pack the truck, and look at the map for the best route back to the airport.

By this point, I had developed a knack for reading detailed maps to find promising places to explore. I figured I would take a route back home that would give me a few more tastes of what I had traveled to find. As I studied the map, I saw one splendid site after another. It occurred to me that, in fact, I had this window where I really didn't have to answer to anyone. I had gas, food and lodging money, and here was a treasure trove of splendors to explore. The more I studied the area where I found myself, the more excited I became. A feeling of freedom swept over me. Right on its heels, my mood went from black depression to giddy euphoria. Within a matter of fifteen minutes, my perspective had completely shifted. The answer was right in front of my face. I was in the right place, doing what was necessary. I wasn't, for these short weeks, responsible to anyone but myself. My attachments to the life I had outside of that present moment seemed insignificant, at best, by comparison. I could follow my curiosity from one wonder to the next, changing course on impulse if I wanted, stay put until I had my fill, letting the experience of each moment determine the next.

The word "sacred" is slippery, and, like the words beauty, truth, love, consciousness and God, defies objective, measurable definition. Its use is most often accompanied by some kind of conflict: once someone declares something "sacred," threats to that sanctity are immediately apparent. The effect of exploring these places was redefining the meaning of the word sacred for me. I came to understand it less and less in terms of invisible beliefs and values, and more and more on very real things I could see, touch, smell, feel and walk through. The entirety of it was alive. From skies shining with stars too numerous to ever count, to geologic strata formed inconceivably long ago, forces that make the scale of one human life seem less than trivial are working together to create an environment of strange, sometimes staggering surprises that make things we typically consider "miraculous" seem like parlor tricks. The factual reality here is far more strange, complex, and unlikely than anything humanly imaginable. Such places also seem generous to me. They're spacious and luminous, full of outrageous color, twists, turns, precipitous heights and cavernous depth. Tenacious, tough, battered, exuberant life is interwoven throughout. Everything connects with everything else, part of a parade of forces that stretches across the existence of the universe. They're unique on the planet.

The third and final trip of this period happened in October of 2008. The economy was in free fall. Hundreds of thousands of people were losing their jobs every week. America was about to elect Barrack Obama. The country was still embroiled in two very hot wars, one of which was probably illegal. None of the people who had employed torture techniques in the name of "national security" were being held accountable. News of government spying on private citizens without warrant was still fresh. In 2007 the north polar ice cap had melted with astonishing, unprecedented rapidity and 2008 was not far behind. The environmental news was increasingly dreadful on all accounts. Meanwhile, for those not directly affected by the job losses, the violence, the increasingly frequent storms, wildfires and toxins, life went blithely along with comfort, convenience and the occasional getaway.

I had been hired by a major magazine to illustrate a story about Basque restaurants in Nevada. The magazine's budgets for shoots were being slashed because of precipitously dropping advertising revenue, and I had a reputation for bringing back publishable work on a tight budget. It felt absurd to be making photographs about interesting things to do on an upscale vacation under the circumstances, but I was in no position to quibble. Beside that, even with a minimal budget, I was able to tack a week onto the trip for my own explorations without so much as a question from the photo editors. They were supportive of the prospect.

So it was, I found myself on my way to the town of Elko, Nevada, finishing three long days of shooting for the magazine story, with another week of free roaming ahead, to photograph as I pleased. On the outskirts of Elko, I saw the Newmont Gold Quarry. This is a strip mine, five miles by five miles, that employs a technique called cyanide leach heap extraction to remove gold from ore. To my eyes, it looked like one of the most obscene things I had ever witnessed. I was afraid to photograph it, since I had no authorization to do so. But I could see it, and it depressed me. It's one of the most profitable gold mines in the world. The recent economic turmoil had driven the price of gold to record highs. The mine was operating at full capacity.

When I got to the restaurant I was assigned to photograph, the first thing I saw was a large aerial view photographic mural of the gold mine on the wall of the salon where customers wait to be seated. The gold mine was the biggest employer in the town, and they were proud of it. Elko also has a number of casinos and brothels throughout the town, since gambling and prostitution are legal in Nevada.

Of all the places in the west I had the chance to explore, central Nevada was the most provocative. The state is interwoven with extreme contradictions: huge military bases, sacred sites of indigenous cultures, strip mines, strip clubs, secret CIA operations centers, places where fossilized dinosaur bones are found in huge agglomeration, nuclear test sites, idyllic mountain valleys with clearwater streams feeding perfect forests, otherworldly craters of extinct volcanoes, expansive deserts of stunning beauty, magnificent -if shy, wildlife. As I explored it, occasionally listening to the news on the radio, I came to see it as the front line of a conflict, between primordial forces of vital life, and the devouring technology of industrialized consumer capitalism.

About two days into this excursion I came across the decomposing corpse of a coyote that was probably shot to death, on the edge of a public "wildlife management area." The remains of it's coat indicated it was probably healthy when it died. It seemed obvious to me that someone shot it gratuitously. This wasn't the first time I had come across such a grotesque scene. But this time, at this point in my life, in the context of everything I was experiencing, it hardened me. Something flipped inside me.

I resolved to strip my life down to essentials. I would shut down my apartment in Brooklyn and move to Kansas, to be closer to my father, find any job I could to maintain the essentials in my life, and make exploring beauty in landscape the central focus of my life. For the remaining five days of that trip I photographed prolifically with an abandon I had never known before. It seemed like there was no end of amazing things to see and try to compose into coherent images. Each day started well before dawn and went on past sunset. I ate two quick, cheap meals per day, on the move. I changed course often. My days started and ended in the cheapest motels I could find. One night I had to pull the case off a pillow because it had dried blood stains on it. I was so tired and exhilarated I slept soundly in spite of the bad smells, dubious hygiene and occasional strange sounds coming from neighboring rooms. I drank coffee from cans in the morning and met the sunrise with alert exuberance. I felt like I was in a kind of free-fall. The chances of ending up homeless were slim, but not completely out of the question. I had no idea how far "down" would be, or how I might find my footing once the drop ended. All I knew for sure was that I had to break free of the tension I felt while living a life dependent on advertising money. And I had to find a way to connect with the landscape, as a central purpose of my life.

When I got back to Brooklyn I immediately processed the film I had shot and did a preliminary edit. Then, I put it away and began packing my life up. It's taken me nearly ten years to finally begin seriously trying to figure out what the pictures I shot during that time might add up to. The decade has been the most prolific of my life. I have been able to continue exploring - though the path has had some peculiar twists. The technology of photography has evolved dramatically. I can accomplish more with my own labor than a photographer twenty years ago could get done with a trained team of collaborators. Digital cameras offer instant feedback, with no cost of film. The medium itself has changed. Ten years ago, photographic images were as common as raindrops. Now it seems we swim in an ocean of them. It's never been easier make a picture or more challenging to make coherent use of photography's possibilities.

When I archived the negatives, ten years ago, I was pretty careful about it. Everything is in chronological order. I kept flight information, a few receipts, my maps, guidebooks, reference materials, and some notes. All this helped me remember what it was like to stand in those places, observing, with the blood dancing in my veins. Working up the images has been unlike any other experience I've had in my life. It's been both frustrating and deeply rewarding. I remain deeply skeptical of the content of the work: how many photographers have explored the west, looking for "good shots"? How can any photograph even begin to translate the marvels of the place? And yet, the negatives were shaped by the light of those places... The connection is real.

How can I not at least try?

Philip Heying
29 March 2018
Lawrence, Kansas