Last Light

The bison was alone in the meadow when the light did what it does at the end of a clear day in Yellowstone - turning warm and oblique, falling across the grass in long shadows and catching the texture of everything it touched. The animal was grazing, head down, indifferent to the light that was transforming the world around it. The pines and the mountains behind it had gone blue in the distance. The sky above the horizon was beginning its evening shift toward gold.

Yellowstone in the late afternoon hours has a quality unlike anywhere else I have photographed - something in the combination of the thermal steam, the high altitude light, and the open meadows that produces a distinctive warmth and depth in the color. The bison in this landscape is not an incidental detail; it is the point around which the landscape organizes itself. The animal has been here longer than the roads. In the evening light, that fact feels obvious.

Last Light is an image about the end of a day in a place that hasn't changed as much as most places have - where the same species that roamed this valley ten thousand years ago still roams it, still grazing as the light goes out. On metal, the warmth of that Yellowstone sunset carries forward into the room, and the bison's solitary presence in the landscape gives the image a quiet weight that grows the longer you look at it.