I've Been Making This Photograph Since I Was Nine

I was nine years old when our next-door neighbor invited my father and me to spend the day on his ranch. Joe D. was a genuine Texas cowboy, and that afternoon I rode my first horse.

Late in the day, we climbed a gentle rise. Waiting on the other side were several dozen acres of blooming Texas Indian Paintbrush. The sun was low enough that every flower seemed to glow from within. The hillside looked as though it had caught fire.

I've never forgotten that hillside.

More than sixty years have passed since that afternoon, yet every spring, when Texas Indian Paintbrush begins to bloom, that memory quietly returns. I don't go looking for it. It simply arrives with the flowers.

I didn't realize it then, but I've been making this photograph ever since.

This spring reminded me how different one wildflower season can be from the next. Paintbrush appeared, but not with the abundance I remembered. The plants seemed smaller, and the blooms lacked the strength that makes an exceptional year unforgettable.

Some springs belong to Bluebonnets. Others belong to Coreopsis. Occasionally there isn't a single flower that defines the season.

The photograph you see here came from a spring two years earlier, when Paintbrush covered roadsides in a way that immediately took me back to that ranch. Looking at it again reminded me that remarkable seasons don't last very long. If you don't pay attention when they arrive, you may wait years before seeing another like them.

When wildflower season begins, I spend long days driving Texas backroads. I stop wherever something catches my attention. Sometimes it's an entire field. Sometimes it's a single flower growing beside a fence or tucked into a ditch. Most of the time, I'm looking less at individual flowers than at how different species share the landscape.

That was what caught my eye here.

Texas Indian Paintbrush appeared again and again with Engelmann's Daisy and Crimson Clover. They weren't always growing side by side, but they belonged to the same season. Wherever I found one, I usually found the others somewhere nearby. Before long, I realized I wasn't remembering one roadside stop. I was remembering the spring itself.

When I find flowers I want to study further, I carefully cut a few specimens and place them in water before continuing down the road. By the end of the day, I may have flowers from several locations, each one chosen because it represents something I noticed in the field.

The work continues back in the studio.

Each flower is trimmed again before being arranged on the lightbox. I move them, remove them, and try different combinations until the relationships between them feel right. The finished composition isn't intended to recreate a single place because no single place ever looked exactly like this.

Every flower is real.

They simply never grew together.

The photograph is built from memories gathered over many miles of Texas roads.

Once the arrangement is complete, I photograph it through a series of exposures. Beginning with the lightest image, I blend each successive exposure by hand until the flowers take on the same presence they had on the lightbox. By that point, the technical work is simply the last step. The real decisions were made out on the backroads, long before the camera was placed on a tripod.

Even after the finished print was hanging on the wall, I found myself returning to it.

Not because something was wrong with it.

Because I still hadn't answered a simple question.

Why this one?

The answer had very little to do with photography.

Indian Paintbrush had been part of my life long before it became part of my work. That hillside I saw as a boy never disappeared. I simply carried it with me without realizing it. Every spring, whenever the Paintbrush returned, so did the memory.

The Engelmann's Daisy and Crimson Clover completed something I hadn't fully understood. Together they became the Texas spring I remembered. Not one roadside stop. Not one afternoon. An entire season distilled into a single composition.

That realization also explained why I work the way I do.

People sometimes ask why I bring wildflowers into the studio instead of photographing them where they grow. The answer is that I'm not trying to document one patch of roadside. I'm trying to preserve an experience. A single photograph made in the field can faithfully record one place at one moment in time. My Lightbox photographs allow me to bring together the flowers, shapes, and relationships that remained with me after weeks of driving Texas backroads.

The finished photograph never existed in nature.

The experience did.

When I look at this print today, I don't first think about the hours spent arranging flowers or blending exposures. I don't think about the camera, the lightbox, or Photoshop.

I see a nine-year-old boy sitting on a horse beside his father and a Texas cowboy, looking across a hillside that seemed to be on fire.

That memory waited a long time to become a photograph.

Perhaps some photographs do.