Fountain Hills Fountain

Author's Comments

The fountain is a strange thing to photograph because it is, by design, an event. Fifteen minutes at the top of the hour, then nothing, and you are either ready or you are not. I have come to think of it less as a subject and more as a punctuation mark in a longer morning of paying attention to the McDowells behind it. Winter mornings are when this place earns its photograph. The desert air is dry enough that the plume holds its shape against the sky, and the low sun behind your shoulder will throw a rainbow into the mist if you have positioned yourself correctly. Four Peaks sits in the distance with that bruised blue color the range takes on before the day fully warms, and the fountain rises in front of it like a white exclamation point against a watercolor. Be there for the nine o'clock run. The park is nearly empty at that hour, the lake is still, and you will get a clean reflection in the surface before the wind picks up and breaks it. A long exposure softens the plume into something almost solid, almost architectural. A faster shutter catches the fall of individual droplets and reveals how chaotic the thing actually is. Both photographs are worth making. The detail I keep returning for is smaller. It is the moment just after the fountain shuts off, when the column collapses back into the lake and the mist drifts east on whatever breeze has come up, and the mountains reappear behind it as if nothing had happened at all.

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