Chapel of the Holy Cross

Author's Comments

The chapel is a difficult subject for reasons that are not obvious until you have tried. It is dramatic from every angle, which means it photographs easily and almost never well. The postcard version, the cross set against red rock at midday, is everywhere already. What I have learned after a few mornings on Chapel Road is that the building wants light from a low angle, and it wants the rock around it to be doing something more than sitting there. Winter mornings are when this place comes alive for me. The sun rises behind the chapel and just to the south, which means for the first hour after first light the buttes themselves are catching warm color while the chapel face is still in cool shadow. That contrast is the photograph. The cross reads dark against lit stone, the modernist lines stay clean, and the rock formations on either side stop being a backdrop and start being the subject the chapel is set into. Shoot from below on the road as you climb, not from the parking lot. The lower vantage gives you the integration that Staude was after, the building emerging from the pinnacles rather than perched on them. A medium telephoto compresses it beautifully. A wide lens, used carefully, can hold both the chapel and the larger butte behind it, but only if you are patient with the framing. Get there at sunrise. The lot fills by nine and by ten the light has flattened and the moment is gone for the day.

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