The negative printed above has been destroyed by age.  On the thick 
acetate base of cut film, the gelatin silver emulsion has partially 
separated, and strange crystals have grown in spaces between the 
layers. Yet I still see the vain boys of my youth arranging their oily 
pompadours and congealed butch cuts. I almost remember the smell 
of the Vasoline Hair tonic.
 
I do not remember why I took a Speed Graphic camera with a 
flashbulb into this men’s room in high school. But I do recall the 
urge to make a telling photograph. My dream was photography. The 
result was to be as impermanent as memory. But dreams seem to 
survive.
 
I dream sometimes of the places in my pictures, long after my time 
there. Sometimes the dreams have replaced the memories. I dreamt 
for years of walking the streets of Cambridge and Buffalo, of my 
California high school halls, of Mexico, the high Sierras, the grey 
quiet of Europe a decade after World War Two, and of the marine, 
alpine and desert West.
 
So some of the photographs have a dream-like quality for me. Too, 
the geology of the west and what it tells about the vastness of time 
and the power of its cataclysms makes it seem likely to me that our 
grasp of reality is weak. I do not question the worth of our 
accumulating knowledge, but our dream of security is a web our minds
have spun.


 
The Anasazi people who lived in Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon 
worried that a leaning spire of sandstone over their homes would 
fall,  and threw many magic sticks behind it to prevent disaster. 
They finally moved out of Pueblo Bonito in about 1300. They were 
right to worry. The spire did crash into Pueblo Bonito — in about 
1940. There is human time, and there is geologic time.