The Weight of a Retreat: Wyoming Home Mountain Storm, 1987

It was late August 1987. I had just completed what I consider my first genuine photography pilgrimage. This transformative experience in Yellowstone National Park marked a turning point for me. I transitioned from merely taking pictures to embarking on the gradual and challenging process of making them. However, the landscape has a peculiar way of humbling you. An unseasonably early winter pattern began to descend upon the park. I found myself cutting my trip short, hurriedly packing my gear, and driving swiftly to stay ahead of the encroaching threat.

Then, just a few miles outside the park boundary, I caught a glimpse of it.

The scene presented a stark display of raw scale. Through the window of my car, the landscape was no longer vast; it exuded a sense of tension. A modest homestead stood anchored in the valley, appearing remarkably fragile beneath the immense, churning weight of the clouds rolling down the ridge. It was a quintessential “f/16 and be there” moment. There was no time for the  tripod or a deliberate light reading. I was compelled to capture that fleeting moment where the hills were being swallowed before the weather overtook me as well.

I pressed the shutter button of my Nikon camera holding a roll of T-Max 35mm film hoping the basic system was up to the challenge. The result was a negative that, by conventional standards, was a failure. It was grainy, thin, and technically stubborn.

For decades, that negative languished in my archives, like an unsolved enigma. In the 1980s and 1990s, I took it into various wet darkrooms to attempt to extract the story from the silver. Unfortunately, the tools and my skills available at the time couldn’t bridge the gap between what I saw through the viewfinder and what appeared on the paper. The contrast was excessively harsh, and the grain was chaotic. It remained an imperfect representation of a frantic moment.

It has taken nearly forty years and a shift towards digital darkroom techniques to finally conclude this conversation.

The challenge was not to “fix” the image, but to honor it. Modern software allowed me to delicately balance clarity and artifice. I refrained from smoothing out the grain or polishing away the grit of that nineteen-year-old’s urgency. Instead, I aimed to preserve the textural narrative of that old film emulsion. I wanted to capture the way the looming light interacts with the moisture in the air and the ink-dark shadows of the mountain’s face.

Now, when I gaze upon the print, I perceive more than just a storm in Wyoming. I see the inception of a lifetime of observation. The imperfections in the grain are no longer mere technical errors. They are the unique fingerprints of a young artist discovering that a photograph is rarely a fortunate coincidence. It is an acquired experience, even if it takes four decades to finally manifest.