Flickr: anabranch

I like to document my life.

I love and hate taking pictures. I find photography to be a classist and lazy art form, especially with the advent of digital, which I love. I live in an over-photographed region of the world. I refuse to disclose the specific locations of most photos I take because landscapes are not commodities, as much as the chambers of commerce in the area where I live would like to make it so. So the canyons and mountains and cliffs shall remain safely anonymous, free to exist for the sake of existing. I dislike the swarms of photographers that descend upon the land and complain about people leaving footprints in the snow under the world's most photographed and visited natural arch. I cannot believe that people actually buy those "Photographing the Southwest" books. What happened to your soul? Shame on you. :)

When traveling to southern Utah for the first time, it is fair to ask, if the redrocks were cut would they bleed. And when traveling to Utah's desert for the second or third time, it is fair to assume that they do, that the blood of the rocks gives life to the country. And then after having made enough pilgrimages to the slickrock to warrant sufficient separation for society's oughts and shoulds, look again for the novice you once were, who asked if sandstone bleeds.

Pull out your pocketknife, open the blade, and run it across your burnished arm. If you draw blood, you are human. If you draw wet sand that dries quickly, then you will know you have become a part of the desert. Not until then can you claim ownership.
Terry Tempest Williams

Do not jump into your automobile next June and rush out to the canyon country hoping to see some of that which I have attempted to evoke in these pages. In the first place you can't see anything from a car; you've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail, you'll see something, maybe. Probably not.
Ed Abbey