A series of photos taken at the April 5, 2025 Hands Off protest in Denver, Colorado against the fascist MAGAT regime and its policies.
All of these photos are published under a Creative Commons 3.0 license; they can be used for any purpose as long as it's non-profit.
This collection of 70 photos was taken in Carlsbad Caverns National Park, New Mexico, and along the nearby Pecos River in the town of Carlsbad during December 2021.
Since
Carlsbad Caverns is one of the most photographed caves in the world, I elected
to try a novel approach with these photos. Instead of picturing the
rock formations inside the cave as static, unchanging objects, I portrayed them
as dynamic, moving, living things that move towards or away from the camera,
gnash their teeth, swing, bounce, spin, and decay. Many of the photos give
the appearance that some swift-moving particles - grains of sand, perhaps
- are exuberantly flowing off of the features and blasting through the
cave, thus visually transplanting the primary erosive agent from the desert above
into the caves below.
This was
done by deliberately breaking many of the rules of landscape photography:
Setting the camera's light levels incorrectly, taking photos off-the-cuff and
out-of-focus, and (especially) moving the camera while holding the shutter
down. (All effects were done in-camera; there has been no digital manipulation
whatsoever.) To complete the collection, photos of reflections of lights in
the Pecos River - and, occasionally, the lights themselves - are interspersed
to accentuate and echo the natural patterns of the cave formations. The water
that melted through the limestone of Carlsbad Caverns to form its wonderful
features is thus brought back into it in volume, while the dimly-lit results of
watery erosion are lifted from the depths of the caverns to the world above and
flung across the water for all see.
