Photography · 2014
Fine art landscape photograph made near Big Bend in 2014, later incorporated into the Wittliff Collections Festival identity and accepted into The Wittliff Collections’ permanent Southwestern photography collection.
I took this photo which became Sunrise to Terlingua in November 2014 while driving from Marathon toward Big Bend and Terlingua for a day of horseback riding along the Rio Grande. Before dawn, the first light began to break between the distant mountain ranges, so I pulled over and waited as the landscape slowly came into view.
What stayed with me was the stillness of that morning and the scale of the country opening up around me. The photograph became a record of that moment, but over time it also took on a life beyond the original trip.
Years later, I used the landscape from the photograph as the basis for the Wittliff Collections Festival identity, which I developed in collaboration with Bill Wittliff. That connection gave the image another layer of meaning, linking a personal photograph of West Texas to a project centered on the creative culture of Texas and the Southwest.
In 2021, Sunrise to Terlingua was accepted into The Wittliff Collections’ permanent Southwestern photography collection at Texas State University in San Marcos. Having the photograph, and the identity it later inspired, connected to The Wittliff Collections has made this one of the more meaningful pieces in my body of work.