Zabriskie Point, near the entrance to the Furnace Creek oasis with its hotels and restaurants, is the place to size up the badlands and topographical extremes of Death Valley, and the site of the first picture most photographers make upon their first dawn. In the far distance is the Panamint Range, and closer is the declivity to the desert floor. The vantage point here, with the badlands rising in the foreground to Manley Beacon, the shark’s tooth point that captures first light, is a little to the right of the main viewing area. Before dawn, as the Belt of Venus smothers the sky in its pink and blue glow, one can only image the terror to behold in midsummer when the sun announces itself.
These badlands near Zabriskie Point catch early morning light, while maintaining mystery in their abstraction.
The Devil’s Golf Course stretches across the valley floor, its mud and salt formations a hazard to shins and even walking upright. Even shooting handheld, as this picture was, can capture the surpassing oddness of Death Valley. And honestly, it’s a location made for black and white conversion given the cloudy skies.
In the bunkers of the Devil’s Golf Course at the edge of Badwater Basin, navigating into the large field, while difficult, helps in understanding the nature-shaped otherworldliness of Death Valley.
We tried finding a perfect polygon in Badlands Basin, but honestly, even the irregular shapes against the salt floor were photographable. When the seas receded, they left a perfect medium for the sculpting wind and heat.
Slightly south of The Devil’s Gold Course, the geometric salt formations of Badwater Basin beguile at dawn or dusk.
The wind writes its story in the Mesquite Dunes.
This was a beautiful dune to capture in color, but black and white reveals its soul.
Tatouine — whose fictional life was captured by George Lucas here at Death Valley — never looked so beautiful. Here the wind’s calligraphy tells a tale. After the sandstorm — fortuitously arriving the next morning — we wonder what chapters would be written here.
We think of desert as being dead, but even the sand can express its personality.
The timelessness of black and white photography seems well suited for the desert.
Road below, pink contrails above, the badlands off of 20 Mule Team Canyon are a perfect spot for a long-exposure just before sunrise.
The caramel-colored foreground and pink light on the Panamints gives a sense of the shimmering color of another dawn near Zabriskie Point.
Foreground rocks ground the viewpoint over Death Valley on a frigid afternoon. It got colder when the sun went down,
I promised not to reveal the location of this image, taken at 6400 feet because a sandstorm had disrupted life in the valley floor, because it’s too special to share (though easy to figure out where it is.) We dubbed it Oh Shit Point, because that was the reaction of two of us in the car as we first spied it. In the far distance, way down below, is Badwater Basin, some 6700 feet lower — and certainly 20-30 degrees warmer, than where we were for a cold winter’s sunset.
Death Valley '23
In the first of his “Duino Elegies,” Rilke writes, “For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to bear, because it so serenely disdains to destroy us.”
Throughout the America West, many of the most beautiful places are safe to observe, to hike in, even to photograph, with the tension that comes from the certain knowledge that one mistake — a misplaced foot on a cliff’s edge, a hubristic outing in the heat or cold, a foolish neglect to take water — could destroy us, in the blink of an eye, or slowly, tortuously. No place I’ve ever been contains such a duality as Death Valley.
From the Badwater Basin, the lowest point in North America, 300 feet below sea level, to the Panamint Range that rises nearly 7000 feet off the valley floor, the extremes contained within the largest National Park in the Lower 48 are daunting, and all the more sublime because of it.
When my wife and I visited Death Valley in mid-Winter 2022, we instantly fell in love with it, well aware that the season had calmed its most dangerous aspect. The implied threat contained within its name lurked everywhere. It was cool but too hazy for good photography, and I vowed to come back someday, with a camera in hand, intent on doing it justice. Its unearthly oddness is beguiling.
Rilke writes that “Every Angel is terrifying.” Death Valley may be terrible, but it is oddly charismatic.
In the summer of 2022, I saw that the estimable landscape photographer Vieri Bottazzini would conduct a five-day landscape photography workshop in Death Valley, and I signed up. It was, photographically speaking, like a PhD course, and I learned an enormous amount.
One thing different from the expectations I had going in was that Vieri’s approach emphasizes the words “fine art” as the modifier of “landscape photography.” So, in this gallery, you will find only 15 images culled from four score taken over ten sessions — dawn and dusk, principally. I hope these images capture the surpassing weirdness of Death Valley, and both its Angels and its Terrors.