Where the Land Surrenders to the Sky

A continuation of my reflection on nostalgia, creativity, and a particular open space in south Denver. Read the first part here.

Have you ever listened to dub techno music?

It’s a strangely wonderful genre. The music blends the deep bass of a techno drum machine with the eerie reverberation of dub reggae tracks. The songs aren’t catchy or energetic, but they still seem to engulf you because of how big they sound in your ears. It’s the type of music I’d imagine whales would make if they knew how to play a Casio. If you’re curious, there’s plenty of great mixes on YouTube

If I listen to music when shooting, I listen to dub techno. It’s the perfect genre that keeps me present, but without getting overly involved in the present. That’s especially important in a place like the Bluffs in south Denver. This trail network has the ability to warp space in such a way that you feel cut off from the roads that led you there. There are no trees to rustle, so even the wind feels removed from the weather patterns circulating overhead.

I realize that, to some, this probably sounds like a bizarre and unsettling place. In a way, I agree. The area is physically nondescript; it doesn’t match the mountains to the west or the plains to the east. This area is the geological equivalent of standing at that one spot in a magnification mirror where you don’t see your inverted or magnified reflections. What can be identified about such a place or your relationship to it when it refuses to be identifiable?

I don’t know for certain, and I don’t think I ever will, but I think I feel attached to this place because it’s not so easily defined. If you find yourself slipping into your surroundings (zoning out) like me, it’s comforting to go somewhere that doesn’t hold your focus. You can’t focus on the Bluffs because there’s nothing to focus on. You just stare at the void, and it stares back. It isn’t hostile, and you aren’t scared. You’re just the subject in the foreground making sense of the unfocused background.

For all the appreciation I have for this area, I had real no plan for how to capture it. How could I? There’s nothing tangible to document for you. Other than a few memorial benches, which I’m choosing to omit out of respect for the folks they were installed to commemorate, the area remains vacant.

This was a project I couldn’t do that much thinking about, so my kit needed to be simple: one camera with one lens. The lens had the same field of vision as an eyeball, which is relevant only because I tend to shoot with something a little wider. I shot the second Orcas Island piece with a wider lens, so this felt like a return to something familiar. How quaint.

The Bluffs open space is divided by a trail that loosely resembles the Big Dipper. The main loop winds around the plateau for about three miles, with a stem that juts out to the southeast for another two and a half miles. All routes have a nasty incline to get up top, but walking clockwise gets you to the top faster. These disks are the first major landmark you pass on the clockwise loop.

As a child, I thought these concrete disks were helipads, and then they were actually secret missile silos to my friends and I during summer breaks, and then finally in high school I learned they were for water storage. It seems fitting that water would also create such a strange pattern on their surfaces. They could hold compositional weight in front of the neighborhoods below.

Even when I know what those tanks are and what they’re for, photography lets you disregard true meaning for their aesthetics. It’s an opportunity for analysis without logic. I think some people call that feeling.

You might be thinking that what makes this area special to me is some cherished memory, a “first kiss at Makeout Point” type of thing. In a sense, I suppose that’s true. In high school, I would go running here a lot, so I became quite familiar with the trail and its few objects of interest. Repetitive exposure carved a groove in my mind that now feels like a memory.

When compared to my memories, this area was greener than usual. Heavy rainfall over the previous few weeks brought out an unfamiliar lusciousness. Unexpected, but welcome. I’ve found that a rich green complements the stale yellow of dehydrated grasses, so I was glad to have a better color palette to work with on this overcast day.

This was my first time back in about 2 years because I’ve moved away from this area - about 1900 miles away. With the pleasant colors and cool refreshing weather, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. I watch too many movies where the protagonist makes his way back to his home only to find it’s a decrepit waste. As I worked my way up the hill, I kept preparing to see the “closed for land development” sign, or a crater from a meteorite, anything that would lend my visit to some larger conclusion.

Fortunately (and unfortunately), the real world doesn’t work that way. More often than not, I think those of us who are fortunate enough to return to somewhere special realize that it’s doing quite alright without us in the mix. How delightfully impersonal.

Don’t take my lack of memories to share about the Bluffs as a sign that I’m not sentimental. I experience nostalgia very easily. It’s almost like an allergy. Too much pollen and all of a sudden I’m back in a friend’s basement or behind the wheel of my first car or fighting off jet lag on a hotel balcony.

The odd thing is it’s never a specific event. It’s always the aggregated experiences folded on top of each other in a particular location. It’s not “that one time” at my friend’s house, it’s somehow “every time” I’ve been to that friend’s house. Details like a staircase or a piece of furniture serve as the core of the scene, and all the interactions occur simultaneously like a closing musical number. Context erodes away.

This project is rooted in a desire to capture and preserve an area that matters to me. It’s also, as I’ve come to accept, an encapsulated realization that the stage of my life you might call an “upbringing” is officially over.

I’m not trying to crawl back into the past, but I admit the emotions behind this project have left me disoriented. It’s scary just how sealed off “the past” actually is. The vault has been shut. Hope you got everything you needed. Maybe that’s why old trends keep coming back. Maybe we’ll be let back in if we wear the same things and lay farewell tours and legacy sequels at the doorstep as offerings.

What’s more unnerving, that we’ve been locked out of the past or locked in with the future?

When I was in middle school, I had to write a poem for an English class. It needed to use repetition and incorporate rhetorical questions. I didn’t “get” poetry at that age, so I turned in what was, essentially, a bulleted list of rhetorical questions that all started with “Why…”.

I don’t remember all of the questions, but I know they had a consistent theme of “Why should we do anything when someone in the future will probably do something better?”. I guess this whole over-analyzing-things thing started for me at a pretty young age.

At the end of this laundry list of uncomfortable questions was my attempt at answering them:

“Because what else are we going to do?”

I wasn’t happy with that question then, and I still don’t like it now, but it’s become an unintentional mantra for me lately as I navigate “the future”.

At times, it acts as a source of creativity:

“What else are we going to do?”

At other times, it’s the sarcastic shield against the fear caused by racing towards the unknown:

“What else are we going to do?”

I started this project with a story of astronauts circling a black hole after making the wrong choices. Now, having finished it, I recognize that I’ve felt like that astronaut, as I’m sure you have at times. Places like the Bluffs hook me in their gravity. I’m sure you have your own places, people, or things that have a special pull on you.

I’m not self-righteous enough to offer advice, and you deserve it from a better source than a photography-ish newsletter. All I can offer is my recognition of you as a fellow astronaut.

I wish you well as you make sense of your universe.

Thank you for your time.

Be on the lookout for a new Artist Spotlight next week. I’m excited by the guests coming up.

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