It was the beginning of my journey — my journey on Raconteur Road. It started in Africa, where I was born, and where I first couldn't sit still. My Unimog lunged and lurched forward in 4x4, at the pace of a dung beetle — the potholed track swaying me back and forth until I started wondering how many dung beetles I'd flattened that day.
A dung beetle — you know, the little black African one that rolls a ball of dung backwards. It takes enormous effort and concentration: full six-wheel drive to push a great load of shit forward while facing the other way. Not so different from us. The beetle moves its load forward while looking back; we move forward trying to get our own load of crap behind us.
But the beetle never arrives. There's no finish line for a ball of dung — only the pushing. And that's not a sad story. It's physics.
The atoms in your hands were forged inside stars that died long before the Earth. They never meant to become you — a difference built up somewhere, a gradient, and something began to flow, and the flow folded itself into a shape that ran that difference better than the still stuff around it. That shape was alive. It's not poetry: you hold together the way a flame does, or a river in flood — only while something keeps moving through you. Stop, and the pattern lets go.
So I don't try to arrive. To arrive is to reach the sea, where the river stops being a river. I take the shot, the pass, the turn — then leave it behind, because the next one is already pulling. The slow road that keeps exploring as it cools has a name in physics — annealing — and that, I think, is the whole idea: the road, the book, the beetle, all of it.
The photographs in here aren't pictures of this. They are this — light and dust and a structure made of dead stars, holding still for one second on its way north. A raconteur keeps telling; even Ushuaia, down at the end of the world, was only where the next route began. I photographed all of it, then packed the cameras, climbed back in, and pushed on. Read the full passage →
A landscape photography book is in production.
So is the road that produced it.