The Sopris, Three Times

I have made roughly three thousand photographs of Mount Sopris over fifty years — call it seventy-five trips, with a tripod, in every season — and I would defend three of them.

The first is from 1991, when I was thirty-three and did not yet know what I did not know. The second is from 2008, in the spring after my father died. The third is from 2019, the panoramic plate that opens the third section of the new book. Each of these photographs was made under conditions I could not have predicted and would not have requested.

What this tells me, after fifty years, is something I would not have believed at thirty: most of the photograph is showing up. A small percentage of the photograph is talent. None of the photograph is gear.