O’Keefe

This is the first descanso I am publishing from our trip to Colorado and New Mexico, perhaps ironically since it’s the last one I photographed on the “photography” part of the trip. After three days of near constant photography I had actually put away the Hasselblad and told my very patient wife “okay, I think I have shot enough for one trip.”

Then I saw this black cross and the decaying barn and windmill behind it.

I had to stop because a) that’s what I do, basically and b) I had just visited the Georgia O’Keefe gallery in Santa Fe and seen her painting “Black Cross with Red Sky”. The imagery in her painting spoke to me, and I admit I was excited to see such a famous artist also drawn to the descansos.

The light was good and the sky was great and I was far enough off the road that I could focus on the shot without having to worry about joining the targets of my fascination. I swapped out lenses, shooting both the new XCD 2.5/90 and the XCD 4/28, to get a different perspective.

I really need to shoot the 4/28 more often. While it’s a little more arduous to use, I love the results, and I’m pretty sure everything on this page was shot with that lens.

These shots are obviously heavily edited and stylized but I personally like how they turned out. To me these shots cross the chasm between “documentation” and “art” and I have really been trying for the latter this entire time.