Sunrise at Mono Lake's South Tufa
Eugene O'Neill used the word "become" the way it was used in the nineteenth century — to suit, to flatter, to enhance. Mourning becomes Electra, in the sense that grief suits her, gives her a kind of gravity. On this morning, the light performed the same service.
Mono Lake's South Tufa is a familiar composition — "the ship," as many photographers call it, the configuration of calcium carbonate towers that reads from certain angles as a vessel at anchor. The image has been made ten thousand times, and standing in the shallows with a tripod you can sometimes feel the weight of all those prior exposures. But then the sky does something extraordinary and you remember that it doesn't matter — that the light you are standing in belongs to this moment and no other, and that no other living soul is seeing precisely what you are seeing right now.
The fire was brief. It always is. But brief is what makes the memory worthwhile
Fine Art Mono Lake Photography Print
Sunrise sets the sky on fire above the South Tufa at Mono Lake.
