Glen Canyon Dam Overlook

Author's Comments

The dam is a strange subject. I came here expecting to take one photograph and leave, and I stayed an hour longer than I meant to because the canyon kept changing. Glen Canyon is narrow at this point, and the dam fills the gap between the walls in a way that does not quite make sense at first. The concrete is the same color as the sandstone in certain light. In other light it is not. That tension is the photograph. Morning is when this overlook earns its keep. The east-facing dam face takes direct sun for the first few hours after sunrise, and the canyon walls downstream go from shadow to fire in a slow, watchable progression. The bridge cuts across the foreground and gives you a scale reference you do not really need but cannot ignore. I have shot this place wide, trying to get the whole story in one frame, and I have shot it tight, isolating the curve of the arch against the rock. Both work. Neither is the obvious answer. What surprised me was the river below. The Colorado comes out of the dam a startling green, almost unnatural, and against the red of the canyon it reads like a color study. If you walk the overlook to its far end and look downstream rather than at the dam itself, you find a quieter composition that most visitors miss entirely. They are pointed at the engineering. The canyon is doing its own work just past the frame. Come early. The light is gone from the dam face by late morning, and what remains is a flatter, less interesting picture of a very large wall.

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