INCANDESCENT WALKING

 As you may have worked out by now, I like walking in the desert, and I like deserts even 

when I’m not walking in them, and I have a tendency to buy books about the desert and 

then leave them unread on the shelf for a few years.

 

And so, very belatedly, I’ve been reading my copy of The Desert Is No Ladysubtitled ‘Southwestern Landscapes in Women’s Writing and Art,’ edited by Vera Norwood and Janice Monk.  It’s great.

 

There’s a chapter in it about about Nancy Newhall titled ‘Walking on the Desert in the Sky’ – you can see why I was drawn to it.

 

Wikipedia says Nancy Newhall is best known for writing texts to accompany photographs by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, which is fair enough, though she was also a critic, designer, editor, and a very good photographer in her own right.  These are a few of her photographs:

 

The texts that accompanied Adams’ and Weston’s works weren’t just prefaces or introductory essays but poetic utterances.  Some of the pages look like this:

 

The perfect balance between words and images always seems like a great idea but offhand I can’t think of many (OK, any) books where the text and the photographs have equal weight and importance. And the proof of the pudding may be: Adams and Weston are still regarded as great photographers. Nancy Newhall is not regarded as a great writer.  I don’t think this is entirely the fault of patriarchy.

 

Still, I find myself fascinated by some lines of Newhall’s This Is The American Eartha book she did with Adams:

‘you are shut in by distances of light.  You walk in the focus of the sun’s rays.  You are clothed in sun; sun glows in your blood, until even your bones feel incandescent. …

‘Night clings, paling to your body, until once more day is limited, and you are walking in the desert in the sky.’

 

I alternate between thinking this is a bit too artsy fartsy, and then thinking this is a very wonderful description of walking in the desert.

I shall continue to think about this, sometimes while walking.