Cherry Canyon

March 28, 2005

I have been away. After tallying up the number of years I've been married and comparing that sum to the number of times my wife and I had taken a vacation together I determined that we were long overdue— so we left for Seattle and spent the week not thinking about work, blogs, computers, or creative commitments.

* * * * *

When living in California I would often feel the need to escape into some natural setting. The closest bit of nature that you didn't have to pay to enter was a spot called Cherry Canyon. It was a scrubby little canyon amidst the La Canada hills that housed not only a few majestic oaks, but the hulking steel towers that supplied Glendale with its electrical power. When standing near the welded legs you could hear the buzz of power crackling through the thick cables overhead. It seemed a peculiar edition to the dry grasses and crab apple trees. 

Tension, Polaroid photograph, 2004

I often went to Cherry Canyon to take photographs and, in theory, my familiarity with the place should have led to ever more confident and subtle images of that locale. But this never quite happened. Instead I developed a mish mash of stills on a variety of films; all of which look like the work of an ungrounded personality flailing about for some sense of peace.

Sunburst, Polaroid photograph, 2005