The Terra Galleria Blog – QT Luong

As the light progressed towards the evening, I improved the composition of a most iconic scene through foreground refinement. This installment in the series “Steps behind the image” differs from the previous ones as it was made of published images of an icon rather than digging into archives. I had released the images that led to the final, prefered image because they show the scene in a different light.

Despite preserving some of America’s most beautiful mountain landscapes, North Cascades National Park is the second least-visited national park in the continental U.S., behind the remote and roadless Isle Royale National Park. This is because the park itself is managed as a wilderness without facilities and almost no road access, accessible only to hikers, backpackers, and mountaineers. However, there are excellent views from developed and accessible areas adjacent to the park. None in the entire North Cascades National Park Service Complex is as iconic as the view from Picture Lake, located in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest. Near the end of Mount Baker Highway (SR 542), on the west side of the park, a one-way loop circles a pond. The mountain reflected in the pond is Mount Shuksan, sometimes said to be the most photographed mountain in North America – there are other more plausible candidates.

From any point on the east shore of the lake, the view looks similar, and that may lead one to think that all photographs of the reflected mountain are essentially the same. However as is often the case, there are small details in craft that differentiate images. In particular, while the background remains essentially the same, every foot of shoreline offers something a bit different. It is often remarked that when you made an “intimate” photograph of a smaller scene, it is more personal because more unique. In a larger scene, the foreground component is that smaller scene, and you are presented with the additional challenge to connect it to the distant elements.

I first came to the site at midday. Technically, the picture was straightforward as everything was well-lit. Photographing with my large-format camera, instead of pointing the camera down, I shifted the image down to keep the trees parallel, and as usual, a bit of tilt helped render both foreground and mountain sharply. Feeling uninspired by the light, I didn’t work hard in selecting the foreground. I settled early for something with a lot of detail and color. It had several issues: quite busy, distracting bright areas in the left corner, some overlap with the mountain reflection, and a weak connection with the mountain in the background. However, it does capture the feel of midday with pleasant greens and blues.

There is more than Picture Lake in the area. Continuing a few miles to Artist Point at the end of SR 542 and hiking a short trail to the east toward Huntoon Point along the Kulshan Ridge leads to less common views of Mt Shuksan. After scouting around, I still returned to Picture Lake in the late afternoon because I felt there was more potential. Besides the ease of access, it is not iconic for nothing! By that time, the contrast between the sunlit mountain and the lake in the shade necessitated a few technical tricks. First, I had to use a graduated neutral density filter to balance the exposure. Then, as I suspected that the flowers might still turn out too dark, to bring out their color, I used a flash that I had to synchronize manually since like for the three other photos on that page, I was photographing with my large format camera. In metering the flash, I made sure to keep it dim enough that it would not look obvious or unnatural.

Most of my work was in improving the composition with a more deliberate choice of the foreground. After walking along the shoreline, I found one that was not only simpler but also connected with the mountain better, providing visual unity to the photograph. The tips of the flowers form a triangular shape that rises steeply from the left and more gradually from the right. This shape echoes the shape of the mountain. The vertical lines of the flowers, well detached against the water, echo that of the spruce trees, well detached against the brighter mountain. Having disparate image elements that visually relate to each rather than being simply juxtaposed brings cohesion to the photograph.

In the previous photograph, the shade in the lake area help bring out the reflection on the mountain, and also creates a separation in tone between the distant line of trees and the mountain, adding depth to the image thanks to another layer. However, the light on the mountain is so bright that those shaded areas appear dark. As the sunlight gets dimmer, the contrast is reduced. While I was waiting for that to happen, I refined the composition further by moving the camera by less than one foot. Small changes in camera placement can make a big difference! I included a little more of the flowers so that their visual mass balances the mountain better, and also echoed its shape more. I also reduced the overlap between the flowers and the rocks in the lake. By having the flowers and the mountain reflection create a frame around the middle rock, I transformed it into a unifying focal point for the entire image. I was now satisfied with the composition. The Treasured Lands exhibit project is horizontal. You could argue that a vertical composition cropping out the right might be stronger. However the shape of the flower tips wouldn’t complement the mountain’s as well, and there are also lines there that lead to the mountain.

The sunset light had illuminated the mountain beautifully in warm tones, but instead of calling it done, I decided to wait until dark to see if the light would not improve further past sunset time. Sometimes it does, and that was the case that evening. Fifteen minutes after sunset, the color is better. The overall softer contrast reveals the hues of the vegetation more vividly. The lake beautifully reflects the more saturated color in the sky. The reddish color of the alpenglow on the mountain matches that of the flowers better, contributing further to the cohesiveness of the photograph. I walked out satisfied that although there are countless images of the scene, I had applied myself enough to make maybe one of the more finely crafted examplars, and certainly the one I liked the best.

Almost thirty years ago, what drew me personally to America’s national parks was its diversity of natural environments. On the occasion of this year’s National Parks Week, I reflect on what generally made America’s national parks so special and if contemporary changes, especially in visitation, have affected any of that.

The first national parks

To begin with, America’s national parks were the first fully realized expression of an idea as uniquely American as the Declaration of Independence and just as radical: that the most special places in the nation should be preserved, not for royalty or the rich, but for everyone and for all time.

Nature reserves had been maintained in Europe for centuries to protect hunting grounds for use by kings, nobles, and later the rich and well-connected. By contrast, national parks are a fundamentally democratic idea. They are administered by the government but belong to all citizens. The 20th century even saw many examples of wealthy people donating land to the government for the purpose of establishing or expanding a national park. The establishment of the first national parks was a pivotal moment in the story of how we, the American people, made the decision to keep nearly one-third of our land in our collective ownership as public lands. Yet, the vast majority of the public lands could use stronger protections.

While the idea of resource protection – be it wildlife or even hot waters – predates the national parks, the protection of Yosemite and Yellowstone marks the recognition that there is value in preserving the land itself in its natural state instead of developing it. This year marks the 150th anniversary of the establishment of Yellowstone as the first national park. However, it was an accident of history that made Yosemite a state park in 1864 and Yellowstone a national park in 1872. Those public land protections mark the start of the modern conservation movement. Today, as the world is urbanizing at an accelerating pace, we need breathing spaces and nature more than ever. We also need to keep lands and waters in their natural state to combat climate change.

The best national parks?

The national parks may or may not be “America’s Best Idea” depending on one’s perspective, but there is no doubt that they were a very good idea that has been adopted worldwide. More than a hundred countries have national parks. What makes the system of national parks of America so special among the world’s offerings? There are three factors.

Timing. Europe had cathedrals and castles, but America was a blank slate. National parks would become America’s national landmarks and provide its citizens with a sense of pride. They are a focus of domestic tourism, and especially of that quintessentially American experience, the road trip. When the first national parks were established, the continent was still being explored and largely unsettled. We still had the historic opportunity to set large wild areas apart. The longer nature is left alone, the more it thrives. Yellowstone was preserved for the hydrothermal features, but wildlife is now very abundant, more than when the park was established. In the 1930s, when few lands were available in the East compared to the West, parks were made of reclaimed lands. They have now reverted to wilderness. A park unit established as late as Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area (1974) has seen a drastic transformation from an environmental disaster area to a vibrant restored landscape.

Geography. America’s Park system is at a scale of a continent. All the landforms you can imagine are there: coastlines, mountains, canyons, plains. The geological diversity is tremendous. All climate zones are represented: from tropics to arctic, from rainforest to desert (even in the same park). This leads to great biological diversity. Each park is a unique ecosystem, yet they are all interrelated. All the national parks established prior to Acadia National Park (1919) were in the West. Over the course of the 20th century, they would encompass more of the continent and include more samples of each of its corners, but there are still major ecoregions missing among the designed national parks.

Management. Those two natural advantages alone would not have been enough. The example of Yosemite had shown that back in the 19th the state of California was not a very good caretaker. Activists such as John Muir urged the conversion of Yosemite into a national park (1890) with the promise that the federal government would be a better caretaker. Yet, at first, enforcement of national park protections was rather inconsistent. To remedy that situation, the National Park Service (NPS) was established (1916) as a government agency with the mission: to “conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein and…leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” It is a dual mission with contradictory objectives: conservation and providing access, but the NPS has done a very good job. Protections are strong, with no high-impact activities allowed. Most areas are maintained as wilderness. In other areas, there is excellent visitor infrastructure for mass tourism. The National Park Service pioneered concepts now taken for granted and copied anywhere else such as visitor center, park ranger (professional, knowledgeable, friendly), official park brochure (looking at their design history gives an idea of the sophistication), interpretive programs, scenic drive, overlooks with interpretive signs. As a result, the parks have this rare combination: they are mostly pristine but quite accessible. It is partly because everybody can easily visit that the parks have developed a constituency. The resulting wide popular support across the political spectrum is what keeps them funded and protected.

Are the national parks loved to death?

Maybe the most significant change from the early days of the national parks is the growth in visitation – from 5,000 annual visits at the beginning of the 20th century to 5 million in 2016 for Yosemite alone. National Park Week not only highlights our well-deserved appreciation for the National Park Service but also encourages people to connect with their national parks. Is that a good idea, at a time when the press and social media are filled with stories about overcrowded parks?

First, we have to ask what is negatively impacted. For the developed areas of the parks, despoilation has already taken place irremediably when the park infrastructure was built. More infrastructure built for mass tourism actually mitigates global impact. Official trails reduce the impact of cross-country travel and user trail networks; restrooms and garbage cans prevent toilet paper from flying everywhere and waste from littering the landscape. Past a million visitors, it isn’t clear that another half-million is going to harm the environment that much more. What is most degraded, rather than the park, is the visitor experience. However, are visitors really concerned about crowding? They certainly keep coming to the more popular parks despite the well-publicized visitation numbers, and despite the fact that less popular national parks and other public lands are available to them. For the most popular areas, the NPS is extending the practice of requiring advance reservations for entry, and while inside the park, of using shuttles rather than private cars – another example of infrastructure reducing global impact. While this removes the spontaneity of trips, I think the overall improvement in visitor experience makes it a sustainable compromise. Other measures in the same vein can be taken to mitigate adverse consequences of visitation, but what we need for them to happen is above all increased funding.

When I see crowds, part of me is pleased to see that people are loving and visiting their parks. I do not feel frustrated because in most parks, I could find ways to avoid the crowds, be it by timing, hiking, or going to less popular areas. There are many parks that do not suffer from over-visitation, and even within popular parks, there are often quiet parts. More importantly, a place of great power almost by definition cannot be easily stripped of its power. If you feel that sharing the beauty of a landscape with a mass of people diminishes its beauty, doesn’t it imply that such beauty wasn’t that powerful in the first place? On the other hand, doesn’t the fact that you can appreciate the beauty of a landscape through a photograph indicate that you can separate the experience of taking in the landscape with that of standing alongside many? Even on that most popular of walks, the Lower Yosemite Falls Trail, standing on the bridge in the wet mist of the spring runoff still feels raw and wild. The increase in visitation of our national parks does require some mitigation measures, but rather than threatening their core mission, it is a measure of their success, and something worth celebrating this week.

Assembling parts of two or more images into a photograph is a long-established technique that I have occasionally used for technical purposes. This piece looks at the history of composite photographs and details my own approach to composites. Finding my own finished photographs composited into a new one in a USA Pavilion Expo exhibit was something different and led me to wonder about the truthfulness of the result.

Composites are nearly as old as photography

In popular culture, the practice of compositing images is associated with digital techniques (“she photoshopped him into the picture”), but many photographers are familiar with the work of Jerry Ueslmann which was created entirely in the traditional darkroom starting from the 1960s. Its surrealistic imagery is powerful, yet it is hardly technically pioneering. Composite photography had already reached a sophisticated stage of development in the 1850s, just a few decades after the invention of photography, so it is a practice rooted in the traditions of the medium.

Carleton Watkins, Yosemite Valley from Inspiration Point, 1865

Most modern black-and-white films are panchromatic, meaning that they are sensitive to all wavelengths of visible light, reproducing a scene close to what it appears to the eye, obviously minus the color. The film’s primary sensitive components, silver halide crystals, are naturally sensitive to the blue portion of the spectrum. It wasn’t until the early 20th century that dyes were added to extend the silver halide crystal sensitivity into the green and red portions of the spectrum. Before, 19th-century emulsions were orthochromatic – overly sensitive to blue and less sensitive to colors like yellow and red. The extra sensitivity to blue resulted in skies being overexposed compared to the landscape. As a result, photographs made on the survey expeditions of the 1860s and 1870s had a recognizable esthetic. Gustave Le Gray is credited with making two different exposures on two different negatives and then printing them together on a single sheet in order to create a realistic rendering of the sky. Through the 19th century, most landscape photographers, including Eadweard Muybridge and Peter Henry Emerson, have resorted to compositing in order to expose properly both the land and sky.

Eadweard Muybridge, Valley of the Yosemite from Mariposa Trail, 1873

From there, it was a short matter of time before photographers used a different sky. As Henry Peach Robinson writes in Pictorial Effect in Photography (1869):

It rarely happens that a sky quite suitable to the landscape occurs in the right place at the time it is taken […] These difficulties are got over by combination printing […] the result will depend, to a very great degree, upon the art knowledge of the photographer in selecting a suitable sky…

In landscape photography, only two photographs needed to be joined in a fairly simple way, at the horizon, but composites in people photography are more complicated. Even today, when I make a group photograph, obtaining a consistent good pose and pleasant expression for each individual remains a challenge, when a single blink can marr the entire photograph. Imagine how hard it must have been in the days when slow film required sitters to remain still during the long exposure times, not to mention the depth of field issues associated with large format cameras. What started first as a way to alleviate those technical problems turned for photographers such as William Notman, Henry Peach Robinson, and Oscar Gustave Rejlander into a new creative endeavor, as exemplified by Rejlander’s Two Ways of Life, a photograph that combined over thirty captures to create a complex allegorical tableau. Naturally, at that time, heated debates rose about manipulation and truthfulness. This article on Artform offers a thorough discussion of composite imagery in the 19th century.

Oscar Gustave Rejlander, Two Ways of Life, 1857

In the early 20th century, Surrealists used photo montages to create disturbing images that clearly didn’t represent reality. Starting at the end of that century, digital technology enabled more complex compositing. In photomosaics, a great number of images are assembled by software to create a new pattern when viewed globally, while the component images remain identifiable in a close-up view. The technique is often used for commercial imagery, but Chris Jordan’s Running the Numbers is maybe the best-known art project using it. Another favorite innovative use of digital compositing is the Day to Night series of Stephen Wilkes, which seamlessly juxtaposes moments from 24 hours. In all those images, the compositing is obvious to the viewer. The rest of the article is about composite photographs crafted to make them appear as realistic images. Photographers such as Marc Adamus popularized the approach in nature landscape photography. For the past few years, mainstream photo-editing software such as Photoshop offer the option to replace the sky with a stock image by a single click, therefore automating a technique discovered more than a century and half ago.

Technical composites

A first category of composites aims to overcome the technical limitations of cameras in order to produce a higher-quality picture. While the resulting image shows more detail than a single shot, it could have been created as a single shot of technically lower quality. I consider them to be a part of the evolving photographic process. Yet, in the context of photojournalism, they are not considered acceptable, even though black and white photography, despite purposely erasing content by removing information, is. In this section, I am surveying each of the main techniques and my approach to it.

Exposure composites capture a range of light that is too large for a single exposure by merging the best-exposed parts of a series of photographs where the only variation is exposure. High Dynamic Range (HDR) is one algorithmic way to do it by creating an HDR file with more bits than the standard eight representing colors on digital devices, then “tone mapping” it back to an eight-bit file. For some photographers, the effect resulting from tone mapping is part of the technique’s appeal, but their unrealistic appearance never resonated with me. Instead, I made frequent use of exposure blending, which instead relies on manual local selections to get the best-exposed parts, and when done carefully, achieves a more natural appearance. With the advent of high-dynamic-range sensors pioneered by Sony, a single exposure is sufficient to capture the entire range of light except maybe in some situations with the light source included in the image. However, brightening the shadows can introduce noise, so if the goal is the best possible tonal quality in a print, exposures composites are still a useful tool.

Focus stacks extend the depth of field beyond what is possible with a single exposure. Images otherwise identical but focused at different depths in the scene are merged by selecting the best-focused parts of each. Modern high-resolution sensors reveal imperfectly focussed areas more than earlier, lower-resolution sensors. The higher resolving power also means that the loss of resolution caused by diffraction when stopping down lenses occurs at larger apertures. In the 2000s, I rarely resorted to focus stacking, with the exception of my Sand Grains series, but nowadays I find it essential in order to take advantage of the full resolution modern sensors have to offer. However, this is not to say that the resulting photograph is not possible without focus stacking. You’d be able to make the same picture, but you couldn’t enlarge it as much before the viewer would notice that some parts are out of focus.

Panoramas merge images taken consecutively from the same viewpoint to create a wider view. As implied by the name, they are usually in an elongated, panoramic format, not only for esthetic reasons but also because it is technically easier to create panoramas made of a single row of images. Images with extreme angle of views (from 180 degrees up to 360 degrees) must be rendered with a non-planar projection such as a cylindrical or spherical projection, in which some lines in the scene will be rendered as curves in the image. Those could not be created with single-shot cameras and lenses. However, most of the panoramas have a smaller field of view and could be captured by photographing with a rectilinear wide-angle lens (angle of view up to 135 degrees for a 9mm lens) or fish-eye lens (angle of view up to 180 degrees) and then cropping to a panoramic format. For instance the foremost competition dedicated to panoramas, the Epson Pano Awards, accepts anything with an aspect ratio exceeding 2:1. Cropping an image doesn’t feel as satisfying as extending it, since panoramic images feel inherently more complex. The reason they are assembled by merging longer focal length images is to increase the resolution – up to so-called gigapixel images. Although tedious compared to large-format photography, the technique has the potential to produce even more detailed images. If mere resolution is what I am after, given the savings in costs, impact, and burden, I find it a workable alternative.

Sometimes, what appears to the user as single captures are in fact image composites because cameras implement compositing without user intervention. Many phone cameras (including Apple iPhone and Google Pixel) automatically create an exposure composite from a quick burst of images when they sense a high-contrast scene. They are also capable of creating a panorama in real-time by scanning the scene. Frame averaging is a lesser-known type of composite, in which almost-identical images are combined pixel by pixel in order to reduce high-ISO noise. The technique is most often deployed by astrophotographers in order to allow shutter speeds fast enough to capture point stars, with a bit of realignment to compensate for Earth’s motion between frames. However, the Google Pixel phones implement it automatically in a sophisticated way with their “Night Sight” technology. As computational photography’s capabilities grow, we can expect an increasing number of single captures to be in-camera composites.

Compositing across places: the Dry Tortugas image

I find it useful to make a distinction between the composites discussed above, and the second category of composites where elements of images captured at different times or viewpoints are merged together. Such creations circumvent a fundamental attribute of photography: that an exposure captures a specific place at a specific point in time. The goal goes beyond creating a simply technically better picture. Let me illustrate the discussion with a particular example. The image of Dry Tortugas National Park that was displayed in the Expo USA Pavilion definitively belonged in that category. It was assembled out of three images made during a trip detailed here.

Upon arriving at Loggerhead Key at midday, we anchored the boat a few hundred yards from the pier on the south side of the islet, and I immediately photographed the Loggerhead Light, well lit with the sun in my back. I framed the striking lighthouse with the 24-105mm zoom set to a short telephoto focal length (75mm).

We landed at the pier with a dinghy, walked across the island to the north side, and snorkeled at the Little Africa Reef, which had the densest density of corals at a shallow depth I’ve seen so far. My underwater housing doesn’t let me adjust the focal length of the lens, and by default, I had set it at 24mm.

After returning to the boat, while the others relaxed, I got back in the water with my housing and lens still set to 24mm to experiment with under/over water images. By then, it was mid-afternoon. The sun was illuminating the lighthouse from the side – Note its size in the picture. It didn’t penetrate into the water as much as before, and at the spot where we had safely anchored, the water was deep, both factors resulting in no visible corals.

At the time I had licensed the images to the USA Pavilion designers, I was a bit puzzled that they had picked three views from Dry Tortugas National Park, as it is the third less-visited national park in the continental US. When I saw the exhibit panel, past the initial surprise, it made perfect sense from a design viewpoint. Combining two vertical frames and a transition section achieves a vertical resolution roughly equivalent to that of the highest megapixel medium format cameras. Moreover, the composite image holds visual interest from the very bottom to the top. This matters because it is the only image in the exhibit where visitors can have a close look at the bottom, from the base of the staircase, and at the top, from the second floor of the room.

Fiction or Truth?

While I have made many composites, they are almost all “technical” and very few are of the second category. One way their degree of manipulation could be characterized is by how much time has elapsed between the exposures, and how disparate their locations are. In my continued pursuit of truthfulness, I have limited myself to composites with a stationary camera and exposures separated by a short amount of time.

The composite Dry Tortugas image used photographs that were taken at three separate points in time, over the course of three hours, at two distinct locations on each side of the island, and using two different focal lengths. There is no location on Loggerhead Key from which you could see exactly what it depicts, so it does not correspond to a real experience. It is therefore a fiction.

However, I thought that the composite image did a better job at representing what that national park is about than any of the single-capture images alone. Dry Tortugas National Park is an unusual national park, as it is 99% underwater (100 square miles). At the junction of the Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea, and the Gulf of Mexico, its corals are particularly diverse and vibrant. The tiny islets (100 acres) called “keys” are home to remarkable structures. Most of Garden Key is occupied by Fort Jefferson, the largest brick structure in Western Hemisphere. Loggerhead Light is inactive, but was said to be “a greater distance from the mainland than any other light in the world” and once housed the brightest light in America. Although the park is biologically rich, the structures are the primary reason why the national park (initially Fort Jefferson National Monument) was established.

Human visual perception does not work like a simple camera, but is inherently computational, creating effortlessly “technical composites”. The brain can merge seamlessly and dynamically a vast dynamic range of light, far and near objects, minute details and broad field of view. Could it be the case that the same could be said of memories and places? We don’t take in everything in one glance. We absorb parts at a time and build the whole in our mind. Time and time again, great literature shows that fiction can get at the truth even when stories are all made up, that it can convey a greater sense of truth than the truth itself.

As a photographer, I can happily rely on multiple images in a sequence to tell a place’s story, but the exhibit – among other use scenarios – called for a single image per park, and a composite made ample sense. Yet unanswered questions arise. Should such composites be labeled so? Do viewers even expect the image not to be a composite? If they learned so, would they feel deceived? Would a visitor who, inspired by the composite image has made the arduous trip to Loggerhead Key, be disappointed not to be able to observe exactly the scene depicted even though they experience each of its components? Can composites be truthful?

I’d appreciate to hear your thoughts, but if you prefer, you can also answer a multiple-choice poll.

Thank you to Cecilia for the picture of the Dry Tortugas panel

As national pavilions are how each of the countries at Expo 2020 presents itself to the world, I am so honored that the USA Pavilion featured nine of my national park photographs as one of the exhibits and invited me to talk about my work there.

Exhibit 5 (“America the Beautiful”) may appear at odds with the rest of a pavilion that emphasizes American innovations until you remember that national parks were also a most consequential American innovation.

Thomas Jefferson’s personal copy of the Quran was one of the pavilion’s special artifacts. I learned during a Expo 2020 lecture by scholar Andrew O’Shaughnessy that America’s Founding Father and third President, a talented self-taught architect, was fascinated by octagons and built a house based on an octagonal plan at Poplar Forest. That house was an inspiration for the room housing the mural-size panels that form the exhibit. I believe the previous entry depicted that exhibit as well as I could do with four photographs. However, capturing the entirety of such a space with regular photography is challenging, as a super-wide-angle lens (the opening image was photographed at 13mm) introduces wild distortions, yet includes only a small portion of the space. Because the center of the space is occupied by the elevator, no viewpoint conveys that the octagon has equal sides. With this caveat, here is another attempt to depict the space using non-planar projections:

At the center of the pavilion, the room serves as a transition space between the first floor and the second floor. Since the room is two-story-tall and the panels fit each of the equal octagonal sides, five of them are cropped to a banner-like aspect ratio of 2.5: 13 feet wide (4m) by 33 feet tall (10m). They feel well-proportioned because the ratio between the room’s width and its sides is almost the same – making it almost a cube, like Poplar Forest. The staircase and upper floor divide the room vertically. Because of that, rather than splitting images, on two of the eight sides, four panels of approximately square dimensions cover half of the height of the room. The two remaining half-sides are the entrance and exit – the latter with a quarter-side panel above.

Even though two of my images have been reproduced larger (50 feet wide) before in an airport, this time I was stunned by the immersive effect of the wall-to-wall towering panels. The 5×7 transparencies held up well to the enlargements. By default, I have them drum-scanned to a file size of 300MB (about 12,000 pixels in the largest dimension), but for mural reproduction, they are generally rescanned to a 2GB file (approximately 30,000 pixels in the largest dimension). As it climbs up, the staircase partly hides some of the panels. The one at its beginning is visible at its full height. For it, the designers from Thinkwell created a composite out of three photographs made in the same location, the Loggerhead Key of Dry Tortugas National Park.

The choice of images conveyed the geographic extent of the national park system from east to west and north to south (Acadia/Joshua) as well as its diversity of natural environments. It was also a nice mix of iconic locations (the most popular trail in Yosemite, three well-known parks on the Colorado Plateau: Grand Canyon, Bryce, Arches) and lesser-known areas conducive to adventure, like Voyageurs, Glacier Bay, and Dry Tortugas, which are all explored on water.

The US Department of State invited me to Expo 2020 to speak about my work in the national parks. The visit was initially planned for early January, but my heart sank when it was canceled due to the Omicron surge. Fortunately, it eventually took place in mid-February. I did a quick book signing. Given the venue’s extreme distance to the national parks and that any buyer would have to walk around with the 9 lbs book, it was not a given that copies of Treasured Lands at the Rocket Store would sell, so I was pleased to see that even there they were a best-selling book and only a few of them were left to sign. The main goal of the visit was to deliver talks about the national parks and my work in them, and there were also a number of interviews. Below is a photo with Commissioner General Bob Clark in front of the Arches National Park panel.

The #USAPavilion features a series of majestic images by American photographer QT Luong. We are proud to host him as a guest speaker this week. @terragalleria#USAExpo2020 #Expo2020 #Dubai pic.twitter.com/7svBPo32kZ

— USA Expo 2020 (@USAExpo2020) February 15, 2022

The first talk was a non-technical introduction to landscape photography as an event for a group of Youth Ambassadors. Those friendly and enthusiastic college-age men and women are the human faces of the USA pavilion. They serve in different roles that include greeting visitors, guiding them through exhibits, and also assisting official guests like me through the day. I am grateful to all, but particularly to Katrina, Salsabila, Cecilia, and Taty for helping me in various ways to make the most of my short time at Expo 2020.

The second talk took place at the Rocket Garden of the USA Pavilion, right after Andrew O’Shaughnessy’s talk. I discussed the idea of national parks and what makes those in America special before commenting on my photographs in the pavilion with a small print of each as a visual aid. The event continued with a Q&A session moderated by Katrina.

The third talk took place at the Terra Auditorium of the Sustainability Pavilion and was a visual presentation introducing the incredible diversity and beauty of America’s national park system through photographs of each of them. I am thankful to Adel Dekinesh, Nadia Ziyadeh, Maya Nadao-Fall and the rest of the team at the US Consulate General in Dubai for this opportunity to present my work to a global audience, and for all the excellent arrangements during this visit.

I often start my talks by pointing out that I was an unlikely person to have photographed the US national parks. I suppose that I am no longer an unlikely person to turn to for photographs of them. The past photographers seen below happen to be the four mentioned by Dayton Duncan in the foreword to Treasured Lands.

I am grateful to the US Department of State and Thinkwell for selecting my work for the USA Pavilion and displaying it so beautifully in such a high-profile venue. I am so proud that it was deemed worthy of representing the best of what America can offer to the world.

Part 4 of 4: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

The previous entry took you on a quick tour of Expo 2020. This one concentrates on a particular building, the USA pavilion, showing you all of its public spaces. Most Expo pavilions are ephemeral, so my hope is that this series of photographs will help memorialize the USA Pavilion at Expo 2020 Dubai. The construction was going to be done in six months, but the postponement due to the pandemic afforded a welcome additional year. Although the final cost has not been published, it has been reported that the UAE contributed $60 million.

With a large number of pavilions present, the visitor’s attention span is necessarily short. I spent many hours photographing the pavilion, but prior to that, to appreciate the quality of the experience, I did a quick walkthrough at the pace of a regular visitor, which took less than half an hour. I found the exhibits cohesive, enjoyable, educational, and effective at conveying the theme of world-changing innovation thriving in an environment enabled by freedom.

Entrance

The pavilion’s facade is covered by an overhanging roof screen for shade during hot days. It is decorated with interlocking metal stars that evoke the American flag and form a leitmotif through the pavilion. At night, the space between the stars and the wall makes possible a light show with colors shifting from white, red, and blue to create dynamic patterns. Past the pavilion’s motto “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of the Future” and a welcome video featuring Vice-President Harris, visitors step onto the “travellator”, a people mover similar to those found at airports winding around the first three exhibits. That approach provides a perfect flow, as the exhibits are perfectly synchronized with the pace of motion.

Exhibit 1: Foundations of Freedom

Following a quote from the Declaration of Independence, a model of the Statue of Liberty’s torch is surrounded by a media show that recounts from sunrise to sunset America’s history with iconic images: pioneer settlements, Liberty Bell, Lincoln Memorial, NYC skyline. The key is a quote from Benjamin Franklin linking freedom and innovation. Past the show, a copy of the Quran belonging to Thomas Jefferson, displayed abroad for the first time, is a reminder of religious freedom values.

Exhibit 2: American Innovation

Bookended by one of Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephone prototypes and by Steve Jobs’s first iPhone, a long curved wall made of stars is the stage for projected media showcasing iconic American inventions: the lightbulb, phone, automobile industry, airline industry, the internet, space travel.

Exhibit 3: The Innovation Generation

Displayed in a dazzling array of rotating cubes surrounded by mirrors, media points the visitor to a new generation of innovators, young and diverse people whose start-up companies are starting to make an impact on our lives.

Exhibit 4: The Sky Is No Longer the Limit

Visitors disembark the moving walkway and stare at the ceiling where an 8-minute booming horizontal theater show takes place. Moving objects, most notably a massive sphere, are animated by mapped media projection. Featured are big technological ideas of the future: quantum computing, nuclear fusion, space exploration.

Exhibit 5: America the Beautiful

After the overload of media and technology, two-story-tall photographs immerse the visitor into the natural beauty of America’s national parks as they walk upstairs to the second floor where signs are about the National Park Service and a message from President Biden on climate change.

Exhibit 6: Explore

The final indoor exhibit has two faces. On one hand, the space theme continues with the Mars Opportunity Rover, a panorama it captured, and two special rocks, one collected on the moon (that visitors can touch for the first time), the other a meteorite from Mars. On the other hand, the on-screen media take visitors on a tour of the states, letting them meet people that exemplify American opportunity and inviting them to travel or study in the USA.

Exhibit 7/8: Lift-off

Exiting the building, as they walk down a ramp, visitors come face-to-face with a replica of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket booster, stationed on its landing legs. I may have missed the explanation of its significance as the first reusable orbital rocket and the most-flown in the United States. Even though, it is an impressive display, as its 137 feet (14 stories) make it the tallest structure in a national pavilion at Expo 2020 (overall second tallest) and an apt conclusion for a pavilion that heavily showcases US leadership in space exploration. Because the replica is life-size and has even a patina of soot to make it look like it’s been on a flight, I initially thought it was the real thing. At night, the rocket is a canvas for a one-minute projection telling the story of American space travel. Beneath the rocket is a patio called the Rocket Garden where visitors can dine on American fast food bought at the Rocket Dinner while enjoying performances taking place on the Rocket Stage before maybe purchasing souvenirs at the Rocket Store.

Photographing the pavilion

The observant reader may have noticed that many of the photos above are devoid of visitors. It was not for lack of popularity. Between its opening hours from 10 am to 10 pm, there was consistently a long line to get inside the pavilion, sometimes exceeding an hour – another element of expos reminiscent of theme parks.

I was grateful for the opportunity to photograph the pavilion on assignment for Thinkwell Group, the firm that had designed and produced it as a turnkey solution for the US State Department (read an interview with the designers). Because they wanted from me mostly “clean” shots of the designs without people, I did most of the work before opening hours, from 6 am to 10 am. I am thankful to all the staff at the USA Pavilion for making me feel welcome and for their great job in facilitating the architectural photoshoot. They provided me full access, including to the “attic” above exhibit 4 and to private VIP areas not pictured in this article. The opening photograph was made at dawn. The night before, the staff had removed the blue queue stanchions in front of the building.

Did you notice connections between the pavilion and my work? Stay tuned for the next installment in this series.

Part 3 of 4: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

Expo 2020 is what brought me to Dubai in 2022. My first time at a world fair was enjoyable. What does a world fair have to offer?

World fairs also referred to as Universal Expositions or Expos for brevity, have taken place since the 19th century. The Eiffel Tower was built as a temporary structure for the Exposition Universelle of 1889 in Paris. Closer to home, the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco and the Space Needle in Seattle are legacies of Expos for which they were built. The interval between Expos has fluctuated, but as of late they are held every 5 years. Cities bid to become hosts, like for the Olympics. Due to their duration, which is now typically six months, Expos are the most attended international events, with the record set by Expo 2010 in Shanghai at more than 70 million visitors.

Expos are a global showcase of human achievement and a great opportunity to improve your understanding of the world. While the first Expos were focused on industrialization and technological innovations, they are nowadays a platform for participating countries to project a favorable image through their pavilions. The bulk of the fair is made of a collection of national pavilions. In the past, joint pavilions have provided space to countries that can’t afford to participate in an Expo. At Expo 2020, for the first time, each of the countries had its own. Showcasing the country’s sights, culture, and achievements, they often feature striking architecture, original art and historic pieces, and quirky features that make them a delight to visit and be surprised.

Expo 2020 was to begin in October 2020 (hence the name), avoiding the Dubai hot season from May to September when average high temperatures top 100F, but was postponed one year due to the pandemic. Not surprisingly given the host city, Expo 2020 is the largest ever, with 192 countries represented and three times the acreage of Expo 2015. Consistent with its policy to build bold attractions to secure its status as the newest world city and boost tourism, Dubai spent $7 billion on this project. When they won the bid in 2013, the site was nothing but bare desert. It now has its own metro station and 80% of the infrastructure is intended to be converted into a sustainable city. Due to lack of space, Expo 2025 in Osaka, Japan will scale down to 150 countries, comparable to Expo 2015 in Milan with 145 countries.

Saudi Arabia Pavilion

Switzerland Pavilion

Pakistan Pavilion

The closest experience I had to visit an Expo is the Disney EPCOT theme park, part of Disney World near Orlando, Florida, where one can also see national pavilions and technology exhibits. This is no coincidence, as Disney had contributed many exhibits and rides to Expo 1964 in New York City, then moved them to Disneyland and duplicated several at Disney World. However, a real Expo is more fun to visit. Cultural diversity and sensitivity is higher, and not only because you see more visitors from around the world. Since the national pavilions are each built and staffed by their respective nations, they offer cultural authenticity and opportunities to taste different cuisines. However, the food is quite expensive, like in a theme park, and there can be long lines for popular pavilions. Because nations compete to offer the most memorable visitor experiences, you can see a lot of different cutting-edge and extravagant designs within a walkable space. I didn’t have much free time at Expo 2020, but I’ve included photos from three of my favorite pavilions above. All of them can be visited virtually through interactive 360 panoramas. The Saudi Arabia pavilion was the largest, at 141,000 square feet. Although I am partial, despite its modest size of 36,000 square feet, USA was no slouch, but that will be the subject of the next post. Like in downtown Dubai, photography at Expo 2020 was regulated, with tripods quickly drawing security’s attention. All bags were x-rayed, and on one occasion, I was asked if I had permission to bring in what they dubbed to be professional equipment, even though I had official credentials. However, with one exception, I didn’t try to photograph Expo 2020, instead, I tried to enjoy myself and just made those images along the way.

In addition to the national pavilions, Expo 2020 featured three thematic pavilions built by the host, and corresponding to its three subthemes of opportunity, mobility, and sustainability, linked by a central plaza called Al Wasl’s. Rising at 220 feet, its steel trellis, designed by the firm responsible for the Burj Khalifa, is the world’s largest free-standing dome and doubles as the largest 360-degree theater, where images projected by lasers are visible both from within and outside the dome, making it a great outdoor venue for performances.

I felt that Expo provided an international experience full of ideas and solutions from around the globe. Expo 2020 was historic not only as the largest Expo ever , but also as the first held in the Arabic World. However, that made it a long trip from California. The time difference was exactly 12 hours, meaning that it is the opposite northern hemisphere location on the globe – the flight route was straight north over the pole.

My trip also took place during the pandemic. It was safer than it would appear. First, contrary to widespread opinion, chances of catching the virus on a plane are low. There is no statistical evidence that airline crews have gotten more infections than other occupations. Masks are worn most of the time. In the cabin, the air does not circulate around, but instead enters the cabin from vents above the seats and exits from vents below the seats in a laminar pattern. The ventilation is strong enough that the entire volume of air inside a plane is completely replaced every few minutes by air that is either fresh from outside or filtered to HEPA standards (99.97% of all particles). On international flights, all passengers need to present a negative PCR test taken within 2 to 3 days of boarding. Second, the UAE had one of the lowest rates of COVID-19 in the world. Maybe, there is a correlation with strict public health measures: at Expo 2020, almost everybody wore masks, even outdoors, something I never saw in the San Francisco Bay Area. Staff needed to take PCR tests every two days. Yet, there was the risk of testing positive and being stuck abroad. In addition, I was told that if I extended my stay beyond my official programmed time and I was to test positive, I’d be entirely on my own. In the next post, we’ll see why I visited this particular Expo under those circumstances. Stay tuned!

Part 2 of 4: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

Besides my impressions from a whirlwind trip to Dubai, this article serves as a tour guide to ten of the city’s most famous and photogenic locations that one could see and photograph in a single long day.

It was my first time in the Arabic world, and despite my short stay, I could understand why Dubai has been rising as a top international travel destination. The city is as futuristic as any on earth. It is a place of superlatives, with the tallest building in the world (Burj Khalifa), the largest shopping center (Dubai Mall), the largest Ferris wheel (Ain Dubai), the tallest hotel (Burj Al Arab), and a few others that I have missed. It is home to some of the most remarkable contemporary architecture. High-rises can sometimes look all the same, but in Dubai, most feature a distinctive design. At the same time, Dubai has retained an unmistakable Arabic flair, visible not only in the numerous mosques, prayer calls more melodious than I imagined, and building designs but also in the everyday dress of some. All of this makes Dubai a city that defines modern sophistication with an exotic touch.

As Dubai aimed to become a tourist destination, the first-rate Emirates airlines initially enticed travelers to stop-overs. Thanks to its location at the crossroads of Asia, Europe, and Africa, its hub at Dubai International Airport is at the time of this writing the busiest airport in the world in terms of passenger traffic. From a practical point of view, Dubai is an easy destination thanks excellent touristic infrastructure and one of the best safety records of any large city – violent crime is extremely rare. Covid-19 PCR tests results were delivered by SMS in less than five hours. The shopping and dining are some of the best in the world. The latter can be explained by the city’s population, which is 80% immigrant, resulting in a rich melting pot of cultures that contribute to a cosmopolitan character. I was surprised by the diversity of city’s mix of attractions.

Jumeirah

My first destination was Palm Jumeirah, a set of artificial islands that from the air take the shape of a palm tree – there is another set of offshore artifical islands shaped like the world. A promenade near the eastern tip on the external shore offers a distant view of the city over the Persian Gulf waters. It is the only place from which one can include Dubai’s two most famous buildings, Burj Khalifa and Burj Al Arab in the same frame. Designed to be Dubai’s landmark and put the city on the global map in 1999, Burj Al Arab was once the tallest hotel in the world (321 meters, four other hotels in Dubai are now taller) and according to some, the only 7-star hotel. At dawn, buildings are dark, so the evening would have been preferable, but I had another destination in mind. On the mainland, nearby Sunset Beach, one of the public beaches near Burj Al Arab, used to have some of the best views of the iconic hotel, but it is now blocked by a new building under construction – seen on the first picture. Things change fast in Dubai! However, there are still two spots with an excellent view. The first is Madina Jumeirah, a lush resort village whose landscaped garden and waterways make you forget you are in one of the aridest deserts on earth, with only about 1 to 2 days of rain per year. The palatial hotels and souk recreate an Arabic atmosphere with traditional wind towers. The second is the Jumeira Beach Hotel. From afar, it resembles a wave complementing the famous sail-like shape of Burj Al Arab. A rooftop bar with an outdoor terrace provides a great view extending from the landmark hotel to downtown Dubai. The Jumeira Mosque, a fine midday destination, is one of the few in this part of the world to be open to non-muslim people through two daily guided tours.

Downtown

The star of downtown is no doubt the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building (half a mile high, 828m), which was completed in 2010 and amazingly built in six years. Due to limited time, I skipped the trip to the world’s highest outdoor observation deck (148th floor) and instead looked for views from the ground. In the morning, I found distant views with reflections in Dubai Creek at two waterside promenades: Business Bay and Al Jaddaft Walk where the farther point of view lent to a better relative sense of scale of the towers. For close views, it is hard to beat the fountain pool within Souk Al Bahar at the base of the tower even though the fountains do not play in the morning. However, the Palace Reflecting Pool provides an attractive alternative. You will need a very wide lens to capture Burj Khalifa from near. The widest perspective-control lens, the Canon 17mm TS-E, was barely enough to include it all. Instead of visiting the nearby Dubai Mall, I strolled the Mall of the Emirates. I was hoping for a glimpse of the largest indoor ski area (in the middle of the desert!) but instead spent much time looking for water to stay energized, not a given in a maze of luxury shops. Note that I’ve been strongly advised that deploying a tripod in those places is a quick way to get in trouble with security. Permits for professional photography (which are very hard to come by) will be asked for, and photographers have reported being summarily escorted out from premises. Some even wrote that mere professional-looking cameras triggered the same reactions, but I experienced such difficulties only once and it was not downtown.

Deira

One of the oldest neighborhoods of Dubai, Deira is a world away from the slick skyscrapers of downtown. The narrow streets and alleys are crowded, chaotic, and felt like a meeting of the Mediterranean and India – which they are since the area’s souqs have long been venues for the trade of traditional goods ranging from gold to spices. You’d need hours to get lost in that maze (there are no no-go areas) near the mouth of Dubai Creek, but here are some photos all made within half an hour. As a street photography destination, it works all day, even though the lights of the early evening would be a bonus. Prior to my trip, I was under the impression that Dubai is a very restrictive place for photography. Besides the tripod limitations, drones are now strictly prohibited. In theory, one needs to ask permission before photographing anybody, but in practice, nobody seemed to care. Compared to the norms in this part of the world, Dubai is pretty much an open society.

Marina

Dubai Marina is one of the newest neighborhoods of Dubai and the wealthiest. Bars and eateries make it a popular evening destination. On Dubai’s main thoroughfare, the Sheikh Zayed Road bordered on both sides by impressive skyscrapers, the traffic is always moving, but it slowed to a crawl in the Dubai Marina access roads. Its array of residential towers rising from water reminded me of Miami, but a mosque bordered the canal which is plied by a multitude of restaurant boats. My hotel, the Sheraton Jumeirah Beach Resort was close to the start of three pleasant night walks, the Marina Promenade along a canal, The Walk at JBR (Jumeirah Beach Residence), a sprawling outdoor shopping and dining promenade, and the JBR Beach boardwalk. Towering above it, Ain Dubai is the world’s tallest observation wheel, rising 210 meters, and built with more metal than the Eiffel Tower.

Summary: one-day itinerary with top ten Dubai locations

• Palm Island
• Business Bay
• Al Jaddaft Walk
• Souk Al Bahar
• Mail of the Emirates
• Jumeirah Mosque
• Deira Souks
• Madina Jumeirah
• Jumeirah Beach Hotel
• Dubai Marina

Dubai has an excellent metro system, but it doesn’t reach all locations. If you are trying to visit all the above in a day, you’ll want a car, ideally with a driver.

Sharjah

Sharjah is not a district of Dubai, but a different Emirate – Dubai designates both a city and an emirate, sort of like New York City and New York State. Sharjah and Dubai are two of seven emirates that in 1971 came together to form the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a nation only 50 years old. Although in theory, I could have visited all the locations above in a single day – I did it in a cumulated 14 hours, this did not happen. On my first day in the UAE, in the afternoon I traveled to Sharjah to participate in a discussion panel at the Xposure international photography festival and afterward to a PCR test location. With my 12-hour jet lag – the maximum possible, the difficult acoustics, and the impromptu questions, I initially did not feel at ease in the setting. However, the moderator Elia Locardi, an online acquaintance since the days of Google+ that I was delighted to meet in person, told me I’d done OK and Xposure included me in that video recap:

The Power of Photography… A panel discussion that in and of itself was powerful.

More impactful seminars to come at Xposure 2022.#Xposurexpf #international #photography #festival #Sharjah #UAE #Xposure2022 #welovephotography pic.twitter.com/GLHiT1iqfn

— Xposure (@xposureXPF) February 15, 2022

I was glad to have come as visiting the festival provided me with another measure of the UAE’s achievement. Cities, however impressive they are, can be difficult to definitively compare because each of them is so individual. On the other hand, I’ve been to many photography festivals and fairs, and Xposure was definitively at a scale above anything I’d seen. The photography exhibition consisted of several dozen booths, most of them dedicated to a single photographer. Each of the booths was in itself an exhibit comparable to those put up by best galleries anywhere, with several dozen prints of average print size maybe 30×45 inches (often more), all impeccably lighted and framed. They even recreated a landscaped jungle environment around an exhibit of primate portraits by Mogens Trolle. There were extensive retrospectives by photographers like Steve McCurry, David Doubilet, or James Natchwey. Like at so many locations on that trip, I could have easily spent the day.

Visiting Xposure drove home the point that in the UAE, they dream of big things and make them happen. Standing in the futuristic city, it is amazing to think that less than a century ago, people there still lived in tents. Some will cite easy oil money, but oil currently represents less than 5% of Dubai’s economy. Vision and embrace of the future has to count for something.

My day of touring Dubai was on what was initially supposed to be my “rest day” from air travel – a 16-hour direct flight from San Francisco. It was such a whirlwind tour because visiting the city was not my reason for traveling half-across the globe from California to Dubai, but yet because of the pandemic, it didn’t feel right to extend my stay beyond “essential travel”. In the next post, we’ll come closer to what brought me to Dubai. Stay tuned!

Part 1 of 4: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

The Alpinist, available online for a month (Update: free stream available) is the best climbing film I have seen. Watching brought back memories of my previous life in the mountains, and a particular apex moment, the subject of this post. In 1993, I adopted the large format camera and by the end of 1995, my longest vacation had been a road trip centered around photographing the national parks. However, at that time, I was still obsessed with climbing. Although it was the lure of Yosemite and its big walls that had brought me to California, my love and best abilities resided in the cold mountains.

From the start, I was more attracted by adventure than by gymnastic exercise – at which I am not good at all. On a large scale, the mountains offered a backdrop more awesome than the cliffs and boulders where the difficulty of rock climbing is pushed to its limits. On a smaller scale, the beauty of translucent curtains of waterfall ice festooned with innumerable icicles felt more otherwordly than any rock wall. It isn’t uncommon to find yourself on a thin freestanding column, surrounded by air in almost all directions. The mountains had been so compelling to me because they represented another world.

One could argue that the experience of the rock climber is more directly connected to nature since he holds directly on the rock, whereas the ice climber relies on tools such as crampons and ice axes. However, our knowledge of the world often comes to us through tools that are extensions of the body and mind. The art of photography also entirely relies on tools for personal expression. I felt that using tools was simply a way to amplify my experience. There was a particular satisfaction in finding the confidence to hang out from the pick of an ice-ax penetrating only a fraction of an inch into frozen water. Besides the biting cold, wind, and the fall of ice chunks, that experience felt connected to the mountains as I needed to develop the knowledge or instinct of the changing conditions that critically affect a climb. Rock walls are unchanged. A quick warm spell can cause a frozen waterfall to collapse. A quick freeze may render the ice prone to shattering. A frozen slope may be firm and safe to climb at night and in the early morning and become dangerous in the afternoon.

The peaks where I debuted in mountaineering were all snowy high mountains. Through pressure and the cycle of melting and refreezing, snow transforms into alpine ice. The slopes in the mountains are generally quite far from vertical, so the climbs are more about endurance and route-finding than technical difficulty. Thanks to modern ice tools, I soon felt confident enough to venture into the 1,400-meter high (4,600 ft) East Face of Mont-Blanc (the last three photos here) where I climbed solo a trio of routes of increasing difficulty, the Brenva Spur, Red Sentinel, and Grand Pilier d’Angle, experiencing an exhilarating sense of freedom and wildness.

In the 1970s, climbers began exploring a more transient territory, low-altitude water ice, which can generally be described as frozen waterfalls. Presenting vertical sections, they are steeper than the gullies and couloirs found in the mountains and feature a more complex and brittle quality of ice, adding up to a considerable technical challenge. Their ephemeral beauty, allure, fragility, and the improbability of the climbs mesmerized me. In the 1980s, I learned ice-climbing from Godefroy Perroux, one of the pioneers of that discipline.

In all fields of human endeavor, committed practitioners aim to leave a mark by making something new. In science, you write papers describing discoveries. In art, you create novel and original artworks. In climbing, you seek to establish new routes. During the winter of 1996, I participated in the fourth ascent of Sea of Vapors, leading the majority of pitches (photo above). Conditions were easier, but the line still had the aura of being considered the hardest in the world when first climbed in 1993, defining what was possible at that time.

Afterward, I felt ready to try a first ascent of my own. The occasion presented itself in February of that year when climber Eric Hirst alerted me of an opportunity in British Columbia. It took two flights from California and a very long day with even Canadian police on the scene. Due to the proximity with The Gift and the peculiar circumstances of the ascent, my partner Kevin Normoyle and I named it The Theft. I won’t repeat details here, they are in Eric’s report and mine, both written shortly after the ascent, and also summarized in the notes below.

The first image reproduces the notes that I penciled on the last page of my copy of the guidebook West Coast Ice (first edition) by Don Serl and Bruce Kay. The second edition of the same guidebook is shown on the second and the third image (still from The Alpinist, 55:11). The authors noted that “Subsequent ascents will be exceedingly rare”.

Indeed. It took twenty-two years for the line to receive its second ascent. Marc-André Leclerc was the best alpinist of his generation. As now plainly evident to all in The Alpinist, his unassuming demeanor and free-spirited, ascetic lifestyle belied a supernatural mastery in the mountains. Although at a considerably more modest level, I’ve done a bit of alpinism using the same rules of engagement as Marc-André’s: no rope, no communication device, nor prior reconnaissance. In the movie, Barry Blanchard said that this game is only “for the best alpinists on their best days”, but that is true only of cutting-edge routes. The movie shook and moved me because I could relate to Marc-André’s pure-hearted obsession on a personal level. The Theft is listed on his Wikipedia page as one of his notable climbs and his latest before the fatal outing on the Mendenhall Towers less than a month later. I was honored that we had shared the same route – we are to date the two only people to have led the upper column, and that after the second ascent, Marc-André affirmed:

“It must be the best waterfall climb in southwestern B.C. without question.”

Below are distant views of the climb in 1996 on the day before the first ascent and during Marc-Andre Leclerc’s climb in 2018 in more difficult conditions:

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A post shared by Marc-Andre Leclerc (@mdre92)

Of all the climbing sub-specialties, ice climbing suited me the best because the activity was so much about determination, skill, mental strength (some would translate that as “balls”, or according to my acrophobic wife, a deficient sense of danger), willingness to suffer, and less about physical prowess. Yet, I knew that I had already pushed my natural abilities, and therefore my luck. In high school, I was a frail kid who skipped all the physical education classes. It was mostly by sheer willpower that I got into the world of alpinism, but I wasn’t deluding myself into thinking that I was as strong as most of my partners. In the subsequent years, my two closest climbing friends would perish in the mountains, and so would my ice-climbing mentor.

I didn’t plan it that way, but for a variety of reasons, The Theft turned out to be my last water ice climb. Maybe it was wise to move on after such a high point. Surpassing it would have meant taking greater risks in the inherently dangerous environment of the steeper mountains. I let it go. Besides fond memories, I was content that as a person of ordinary ability, I had managed to do something out of the ordinary. The void left by this departure didn’t last long, as it immediately filled up with photography.

Like many, I had high hopes for 2021, but things did not turn out as well as we hoped on both fronts of civic life and the pandemic. The latter is only one of the reasons that this year, I traveled and photographed less than any year going back all the way to the 1990s.

I already spend less time in the field than one would think, as I make a point to work efficiently to honor my time away from family. But as our children are poised to leave the nest in a couple of years, I pledged to spend even more time at home. For a while, that did not mean much. Although at home, I was glued all day to the computer putting together Our National Monuments. This was the first book where I assumed the publisher function from the start, so unlike for Treasured Lands, there was much more to do than writing, working with the art director on the layout and image selection, and preparing the images for pre-press, especially with so many contributors and disparate sources of information. I am grateful to everybody who contributed to this project. Despite all the particular challenges of this year, we managed to launch the book almost in time. If anything, you can take it as a measure of encouragement and inspiration that even in those circumstances, something beautiful and interesting can still be produced.

Although I had meant for the Fall 2020 southwest tour to be the “last road trip”, back then, I had to skip some destinations because massive forest fires had closed large parts of national forests in California. Like for Treasured Lands my plan for Our National Monuments was to depict the parklands in an encyclopedic way, with a selection of locations representative of their diversity. I needed a few more key locations. For that reason, at the beginning of March, I drove back to Southern California for a week. My previous visits to Carrizo Plain National Monument were all focused on the superblooms. This time I sought to depict other aspects of the monument.

I had visited the high-elevation areas of San Gabriel Mountains National Monument during the summer, leaving out the lower elevation front-range for cooler months. Indeed, the weather was perfect for hiking the trails in the San Gabriel Mountains canyons. Last, a late winter visit to Sand to Snow National Monument provided me at last with close photographs of the “snow” part of the monument, the San Gorgonio mountains.

In April, I was originally hoping to travel to Washington, DC to receive the Robin W. Winks Award from the National Parks Conservation Association at the annual gala, but the event was canceled due to COVID, and replaced with a zoom event. In May, having turned in almost final files to the printer for Our National Monuments, and having received two doses of Comirnaty (better known as the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine) I took advantage of the unused flight ticket to travel to West Virginia for a week to photograph the new New River Gorge National Park and Preserve, which pleasantly surprised me as one of the more worthwhile additions to the growing list of our national parks.

For a long-overdue family vacation, my wife and I joined other relatives to walk the final section of the John Muir Trail in early June. That was the place where I had fortuitously started backpacking a quarter-century ago. However, having spent recent years in more arid and lower-elevation lands, I had somehow forgotten how beautiful the High Sierra was – but also how tough those mountains can be. Especially on that trip, photography was secondary to the experience, yet was a welcome challenge.

After that welcome break, it was time to get back into InDesign to update Treasured Lands with New River Gorge for a third edition scheduled to be released later this winter. In the book industry, they say that producing a book is the easy part, whereas the hard part is to sell it. Even though with the Delta variant, I could not hold any live events, online promotion and the shipping of more than four hundred signed copies of Our National Monuments kept me busy. During this time at home, I also got more serious about collecting historic national park ephemera that may make their way into a new project. It has been a very dry year, even by California standards, so it was much relief to see the rains come back in November. With the hills green again, we resumed hiking in our local area close to San Jose, with the most interesting outing a preview of the Cotoni-Coast Dairies extension.

If you’ve read so far, my sincere thanks for your interest in my work. May the new year be all you hope for, and bring back everything we’ve missed in the past two years. I wish you and your family a happy new year 2022 full of happiness, health, joy, peace, and beauty.

Are you looking for new landscapes away from the crowds of the national parks? Are you seeking a more adventurous and out-of-the-beaten-path experience? If so, how about a visit to America’s national monuments?

National monuments: what are they?

Ask a person on the street to name a national monument, and you will probably hear about the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore, or memorials commemorating our presidents and war veterans. So what’s in there for those who seek to immerse themselves in nature? In the United States, the term has a more specific meaning and, at the same time, includes features more general than built landmarks. Defined by a 1906 law called the Antiquities Act, national monuments are federally protected areas containing objects of historic or scientific interest. The main difference with national parks is administrative. The President can swiftly proclaim national monuments with only a signature, thus providing expedited protections, whereas only Congress can establish national parks.

As suggested by its name, the Antiquities Act was initially meant to protect native archeological sites. However, the first national monument was Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, a natural feature of geologic interest. Congress had been debating over the Grand Canyon since 1882, but even as commercialism was running unchecked, by 1908, it had not yet acted to protect that quintessential American wonder. President Theodore Roosevelt did, by proclaiming the Grand Canyon a national monument. Since 1906, 16 presidents have used the Act to preserve some of America’s most treasured public lands and waters. Half of today’s national parks were first protected as national monuments.

Two landscape-scale national monuments

While some national monuments fit within an acre, others protect entire landscapes with natural features as extraordinary as those found in national parks. In some sense, those landscape-scale national monuments could be seen as national parks in waiting. An excellent example is Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument located in Southern Utah. At 1,880,461 acres, it is significantly larger than Grand Canyon National Park (1,217,403 acres). Within its plateaus descending in vividly colored stair-steps from Bryce Canyon to the Grand Canyon, the monument protects significant paleontological sites, making it a scientific treasure trove. However, for the visitors and photographers, the attraction is its extraordinary geology of cliffs, badlands, hoodoos, natural arches, and canyons.

Nearby Bears Ears National Monument shares many characteristics with Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument: its location in Southern Utah, its size (1,353,000 acres) larger than Grand Canyon National Park, and wondrous red rock country with even more immense vistas. However, it is primarily a cultural landscape. Hidden in its labyrinth of canyons and mesas are more cliff dwellings and tribal artifacts than any other area in the American West, including some of the most iconic ruins on the Colorado Plateau. Both monuments marked milestones in conservation. Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument, proclaimed in 1996 by President Clinton, was the first national monument managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), marking the evolution of the nation’s largest land caretaker towards conservation. The Hopi, Navajo, Mountain Ute, Zuni, and Ute agreed to set generations-old differences apart to petition for the protection of their ancestral lands. In response, in the waning days of his presidency, President Obama proclaimed Bear Ears National Monument in 2016, the first national monument initiated by native people and co-managed by them.

National monuments at risk

National monuments are much less known and visited than national parks, but those two just have been in the news since 2017. In the spring of that year, President Trump signed an unprecedented executive order to review all the national monuments created through the Antiquities Act since 1996 that were larger than 100,000 acres. The review’s objective was to determine if former presidents had abused their power and if the protections curtailed economic growth. It targeted a total of 27 out of the 35 larger national monuments, including 22 national monuments across 11 states, in addition to five even larger marine areas. The public comment period of the summer of 2017 generated 97% support for the national monuments under review. Yet, on December 4, 2017, the President ordered size reductions to the two national monuments located in Utah mentioned above.

In January 2018, I resolved to take action the only way I knew, by hiking and photographing the 22 land-based national monuments in the review. I found a broad cross-section of natural environments, covering a significant portion of the American landscape. Totaling about 11 million acres, they ranged from the north woods of Maine to the cactus-covered deserts of Arizona. Besides their vastness and diversity, their natural features rivaled those in our beloved national parks. Vermilion Cliffs National Monument’s Paria Canyon is more than twice as long and every bit as impressive as Zion National Park’s Virgin River Narrows. The monument also houses unique world-renowned rock formations like The Wave and the White Pocket. Giant Sequoia National Monument protects more sequoia groves than Sequoia and Kings National Parks. The Sonoran Desert portions included in Ironwood Forest National Monument and Sonoran Desert National Monument are as beautiful and representative as those in Saguaro National Park, if not more pristine.

I spent months in repeated visits, immersing myself in those sacred lands and discovering remnants of cultures imprinted on the ancient landscape. So many of those monuments were previously unknown to me. I reasoned that those areas were vulnerable because the general public did not know about them and thus was not moved to defend them. This inspired me to publish a book that could help conservation organizations raise awareness of those lands. To amplify the call for conservation, I invited those who advocate for these national monuments to present their perspective. I am so grateful to 27 local citizen associations caring for those national treasures for contributing their voices, to former Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell for her foreword, and to Ian Shive for his photographs and words that give readers a glimpse of the almost inaccessible marine national monuments in the Pacific. The result is the first photography book entirely dedicated to America’s national monuments. While it includes only a subset of them (the 27 monuments at risk from the review), those comprise the vast majority of the large, park-like monuments. Our National Monuments: America’s Hidden Gems is the first in-depth portrayal of those parks less traveled.

Freedom to roam

After spending a big part of the previous quarter-century photographing the national parks, I was surprised by the freedom offered by the BLM and the U.S. Forest Service’s (USFS) national monuments. Freedom from crowds, from rules, and expectations.

The national parks, set for “benefit and enjoyment of the people,” are generally equipped with a convenient infrastructure of roads, visitor centers, lodges, campgrounds, and interpretive trails. Set up for mass tourism, they can bring in mass visitation. For example, this year Arches National Park was frequently full and closed to new entries by 9 am. People instead head to nearby Canyonlands National Park, but even there, securing a spot at sunrise for the iconic Mesa Arch requires arriving well in advance. Next year, you will need a reservation to enter Arches National Park. By contrast, when I photographed three of the better-known natural arches in nearby Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument, I had the entire place to myself. Despite a dozen visits to Death Valley National Park, I could never find the Mesquite Sand Dunes devoid of numerous footprints from other visitors. At Cadiz Dunes Wilderness in Mojave Trails, I saw many animal tracks but no human footprints, aside from my own.

During the worst days of the pandemic, national parks locked their gates. Embodying the principle that public lands are always open to the public, national monuments never closed, providing much solitude and solace. The heavy visitation of national parks made it necessary to enforce strict rules. You often have to “commute” a long distance to photography spots as no car camping is allowed outside developed campgrounds. In many national monuments, you can camp almost everywhere you like. Unlike in Grand Canyon National Park, in adjacent Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument, I could drive right to the edge of the chasm and pitch my tent a few yards away from where I made my sunset, night, and sunrise photographs. Drones are strictly prohibited in national parks, but they are allowed in the national monuments managed by the BLM and the USFS.

Many national parks places have become such over-photographed icons that finding a fresh composition has become as challenging as securing a spot. The national monuments offer new landscapes whose more subtle scenery invites exploration to get to know and love. The absence of postcard views and overwhelming features frees you of pre-conceptions that hinder personal discovery.

Explore the national monuments

As the national parks become ever more popular, the BLM and USFS national monuments’ vast open spaces offer us places of solitude and inspiration. The rugged experience gives us a sense of the western frontier. With freedom comes the need for personal responsibility, independence, and self-reliance. As their development is minimal, national monuments can test your preparation and self-sufficiency. Many do not have a single paved road. I needed to rent a 4WD vehicle several times to access some of them. Even then, I still ended up with five flat tires over three years, sometimes in incredibly remote areas. With no visitor centers nor rangers around, no brochures, nor guidebooks, the first obstacle in my explorations was to find information.

Our National Monuments: America’s Hidden Gems provides you with the starting point I wish I had for planning trips. Coffee-table books about places often left me frustrated of being in the dark about the locations depicted. With my previous book, Treasured Lands: A Photographic Odyssey Through America’s National Parks, I had aimed to create a book that inspired and informed. Each photograph came with extended practical travel and photography notes, including facts on the parks’ natural history or anecdotal observations about my experiences. Although people in the publishing industry were skeptical that this combination of an artbook and guidebook would work, the book won twelve national and international awards and is also a best-seller in its sixth printing. My new book, Our National Monuments reprises this innovative format, depicting each national monument in depth through a selection of representative highlights with keyed maps and location information. Because those lands are not as popular as the national parks, I do not expect the new book to be as commercially successful. But, on the other hand, the general lack of awareness of those lands is also why I felt this book is needed, a sentiment echoed by the grassroots conservation organizations that care for those critical landscapes. Our National Monuments is my gift to our public lands and those who care for them.

On October 8, 2021, President Biden finally restored the two national monuments in Utah – and one in the Atlantic Ocean. Was it all a bad dream? Republican politicians in Utah are gearing up for a lawsuit to challenge the restoration. The 2017 presidential attack on them reminded us of John Muir’s appeal that “the battle for conservation will go on endlessly.” It reminded us that since 1906, America’s boldest efforts in conservation have been through the proclamation of national monuments. It prompted me to set out to see for myself the magnificent landscapes of the parks less traveled. I hope it prompts you to learn about our public lands’ hidden gems and embark on your own journey.