Ancient Rhythm

The herd was at the river when I arrived - four animals visible in the frame, more beyond it, all of them moving in the slow, grazing procession that bison have maintained in this valley for longer than the valley has had a name. The river curved in the foreground, still carrying the cold blue of early spring. Behind the herd, the pines ran in a dark line across the middle distance, and above them, the mountains were still white with snow that wouldn't release until June.

Early spring in Yellowstone has a quality that no other season there quite matches - the land still brown and cold, the water high and fast, the bison moving across a landscape that looks almost prehistoric in that light. The herd moves the way it has always moved: without a plan, without a destination, following grass and gravity and the slow pull of the season northward. This has been happening in some form for ten thousand years.

Ancient Rhythm is the largest view in the bison series, and the one that says most clearly what I was trying to say in all of them: that there are still places in this country where the old relationships between animal and landscape are intact, where a herd of bison can stand at a river in the shadow of a snow-capped mountain and be exactly what they have always been, undisturbed by the world that has changed entirely around them. On metal at full scale, that landscape and that herd fill the frame with the particular weight of something that has lasted.