A 2:1 panoramic photograph of sunset at Toroweap Overlook in the Grand Canyon, Arizona, available as a limited edition print in three sizes.
At Toroweap, on the Grand Canyon's North Rim, the sun spends the whole day as the one thing you cannot look at. It makes every surface in the canyon visible and stays unlookable itself. Then it comes down to the horizon, and the atmosphere takes enough out of it that for a couple of minutes you can hold it in your eye. The thing that has been lighting the place all day becomes one more object in it.
I had the frame set before it came down, and worked through the two or three minutes it took to go.
There is a particular settling in that. For most of the day you infer the source from its effects, from where the shadows fall and which face of the rock is warm. At the horizon the inference stops being necessary. Cause and consequence occupy the same field of view, the sandstone at your feet and the thing making it gold, and the mind briefly has nothing left to work out. Then it drops below the rim of the world and you are back to reading effects again.
Edge of Day is those two minutes. The source in the frame alongside everything it lights, before the canyon goes back to being lit by something it cannot see.
From the rim at Toroweap Overlook, on the western North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park in northern Arizona, at sunset as the sun reached the horizon. This is a single frame image. The frame holds the low sun on the skyline, the layered canyon walls falling into shadow, the Colorado River in the inner gorge catching the last direct light, and weathered sandstone blocks along the rim in the foreground.
The starburst is diffraction at a small lens aperture as the sun's disc meets the horizon, not added in processing.
The rim blocks are differentially eroded, with harder beds standing proud and softer ones cut back. The picture runs the full tonal range, from the sun on the horizon down to canyon walls already in shadow, in a single exposure.
This photograph has a light direction in it, and that is worth thinking about before it goes on a wall. The sun sits in the upper middle of the frame and everything below is lit from there, so the shadows on the near sandstone run forward and toward the viewer. Hang it where the room's own light comes from roughly the same side and the two agree, and the print reads as though the room is lit by it. Hang it opposite a strong window or lamp and the picture and the room disagree about where the light is, which most people feel without being able to name.
The starburst does something no other photograph in the collection does. It is a hard geometric figure, a set of straight rays radiating from a point, sitting inside a landscape made entirely of soft irregular shapes. On a wall that behaves less like a subject and more like a rosette or a compass rose. It gives the eye an obvious place to land from anywhere in the room, and it means the piece reads clearly from a distance at which most landscapes have become texture.
The composition sends you out and brings you back. The sun sits at the far end of the depth, twenty miles away, and the sandstone in the foreground is close enough to touch. The eye goes to the light first and then comes back down the rays to the rock at the bottom of the frame. That out-and-back is a slower way of looking than a single focal point produces, which is why the picture holds up in a room you spend time in rather than one you pass through.
Related reading: Why Awe Belongs on Your Walls
All three sizes shown to scale, sharing a common center line.
This photograph is offered in three sizes and four presentations, from $1,125 to $13,400. Full pricing across all sizes and presentations.
Each edition closes permanently once filled.
Not sure which size the room calls for, or want dimensions not listed here? Sizes beyond 80 × 40 are available on request and ship crated by freight. That conversation is welcome before an order is placed. Start that conversation and I will answer within one business day.
At two to one, the Intimate size is forty inches across and twenty inches tall. This one survives small better than most, because the starburst is a graphic figure and graphic figures do not need resolution. The rays read from anywhere in a room, and so does the shape of the canyon and the line of the river. What goes at that size is the rock. At forty by twenty the foreground sandstone reads as warm mass rather than as blocks, the bedding in it disappears, and the far walls flatten into a single dark shape. That is a strong picture and a simple one, and it suits a hallway or a wall seen from four or five feet. The Collected at sixty by thirty is where the blocks separate and the layering comes back. If you are weighing a size against a specific wall, choosing the right print size covers the measurements and the viewing distances in more detail.
The rim becomes geology. At the Statement size, eighty by forty, the sandstone blocks in the foreground resolve into their bedding, and you can see the differential erosion directly: the harder layers standing proud and the softer ones cut back beneath them, with solution pits weathered into the upper faces. The far walls open into band after band of stratigraphy rather than a dark mass. The river surface shows current where it was a ribbon. The rays themselves separate at that width, each one a distinct spoke with its own edge, rather than a single radiating glow. What changes beyond detail is the reach: nearly seven feet of frame runs from rock at your feet to a horizon twenty miles out, and both are legible at once. Why scale matters covers what happens perceptually when a landscape reaches the size where the eye has to cross it.
Rooms with warm materials and a wall long enough to give it room. The picture runs warm through almost everything below the skyline, so it belongs with walnut, leather, brass, terracotta, and warm plaster, and the blue at the top gives it enough of a cool note to sit against gray or stone without going flat. Because it carries its own light source it holds a room in the evening rather than needing one, and it works over a long piece of furniture, a sideboard or a run of cabinets, where the width has somewhere to go. Give it a wall it does not have to share and hang it so the room's light falls from the same side as the sun in the frame. Art as a daily experience takes the question further.
Every work ships insured and arrives with a signed certificate of authenticity.
If a piece is damaged in transit, the choice of replacement is always yours, and your edition number stays with you.
Production time runs 2 to 3 weeks for metal, 3 to 4 weeks for acrylic and paper, and 5 to 6 weeks for framed work.
Collector Edition of 25 · Lumachrome TruLife Acrylic · Handcrafted Italian Frame
TruLife acrylic in a handcrafted Italian frame with a linen liner chosen for the image. Frame series, finish, and liner are settled with you after the order, and production begins from there. The frame and liner add about fourteen inches to the finished dimensions, worth allowing for when planning placement.
Signature Edition of 50 · Lumachrome TruLife Acrylic · Gallery Float Mount
Face-mounted to TruLife acrylic and floated approximately one inch from the wall, with no frame to mediate between the image and the room. UV-resistant, anti-reflective, and scratch-resistant, with a lifetime guarantee against fading.
Signature Edition of 50 · ChromaLuxe Metal Print · Gallery Float Mount
Color infused into the aluminum panel itself, floated from the wall on a concealed system. Where acrylic produces luminosity, metal produces clarity. Exceptional fade resistance with no glazing or coating required.
Fine Art Edition of 100 · Hahnemühle Baryta Fine Art Paper
Printed without acrylic, so light meets the paper surface directly. Highlights stay luminous, shadows keep their nuance, and the surface has a tactile quality the other presentations approach differently. The understated choice, and the traditional one.
Complimentary shipping within the continental United States. International collector shipping available upon request.
Still deciding
Designing for Stillness
A guide to choosing art for restorative spaces
How to tell whether an image will still hold you in a year, how scale changes what a photograph does in a room, and how to match a piece to the work a room actually performs. It cites the research it draws on, and it is equally clear about where that research stops. About ten minutes to read.