The Work
Twenty minutes after the last light left the rock, the sky was still burning.
I had already made the image I came for — the warm gold on Shiprock’s western faces while the shadow side went indigo. When that light closed, I stayed. The formation was now entirely in silhouette: a single dark mass against a sky that was cycling through orange, amber, deep blue. The gradient was moving fast — a few minutes at most before the blue overtook everything. I made one frame at the moment when the orange at the horizon still held against the blue overhead, with the rock’s profile cutting cleanly between them.
Where Last Light on Shiprock is about the colour on the rock, Sacred Twilight is about the rock’s shape against the colour behind it. Two different arguments about the same formation, twenty minutes apart.
The Location
Shiprock — Tsé Bitʼaʼí, “Rock with Wings” in Diné Bizaad — rises 1,583 feet above the surrounding plain of the Navajo Nation in northwestern New Mexico. It is a sacred formation to the Diné (Navajo) people. The formation is on Navajo Nation land; this image was made from the public road corridor on the northern perimeter.
At twilight, when direct light is gone and the sky’s gradient is the only illumination, Shiprock’s profile becomes its entire argument. The volcanic neck and its radiating dikes — walls of harder rock extending from the base in four directions — read as a single graphic form against the sky. The shape that has been here for thirty million years is unchanged. The sky it stands against changes every evening.
The Edition
Signature Series. Edition of 15, hand-signed and numbered. Each acquisition is accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity with hologram provenance seal. Edition X of 15 available.
Acquired as a diptych with Last Light on Shiprock, both prints are accompanied by a single numbered diptych certificate and delivered as a matched pair.
(The diptych certificate option is a high-value commercial add-on that costs nothing to implement and justifies a price premium of 15–20% over the two individual prices.)
The Capture
System: [TBC — EXIF required; 3:4 aspect ratio suggests medium format]
Lens: [TBC]
Exposure: [TBC — likely long exposure for twilight]
Date / Time: [Same visit as Last Light on Shiprock — approximately 20 minutes after sunset]
GPS Region: Navajo Nation, San Juan County, New Mexico — photographed from public road corridor
The Print
Sacred Twilight’s printing challenge is the gradient itself. The sky moves from a saturated orange at the horizon through amber to a deep blue-indigo overhead — and the transition must be smooth: no banding, no colour breaks, no loss of luminosity in the midtone amber zone. On Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308gsm, the cotton fibre surface holds the gradient’s continuous tone in a way that coated papers cannot — the transitions are analogue, not stepped.
The formation’s silhouette is the blackest element in the print. On Photo Rag it sits at the paper’s true black; on Baryta it gains a fractional warmth that reads as very dark brown under certain lights, which some collectors prefer. For framing: a wide off-white mat and slim dark frame treats the sky as the dominant element. No glass reflection should compete with the gradient — UV-filtering non-reflective glass is strongly recommended.
