A 5:2 panoramic photograph of the spring-fed falls at Mossbrae, Dunsmuir, California, available as a limited edition print in three sizes and four presentations.
Mossbrae Falls does not fall so much as leak. There is no stream above it. Water arrives from an aquifer inside Mount Shasta, works its way out through lava tubes in the cliff face, and appears all at once across something like a hundred and seventy five feet of moss before dropping into the upper Sacramento River. Hundreds of separate threads, none of them coming from anywhere you can see.
I set up early, before the sun cleared the cliff above, and held the shutter open about fifteen seconds. Long enough for the individual threads to draw out into a veil.
What I did not see for a long while was the figure in the middle of it. A mound of moss with a rounded crown above it, hunched forward, one mass reading as a shoulder and another as an arm folded over a knee. Rodin's Thinker, in moss, sitting in the center of the wall. It had been directly in front of me the entire time I was setting up.
I have spent a career on what attention does under load, and one of the reliable findings is that it narrows. You get what you came for and very little else. I came for water. Standing still long enough for a fifteen second exposure to run is what let the rest of it arrive. Calm is not the absence of noise. It is the condition in which things that were already there become available.
The Quiet Thinker is that figure. It was there before I arrived and it will be there long after, and the only thing that changed was that I stopped looking for something else.
Photographed at Mossbrae Falls on the upper Sacramento River, just outside Dunsmuir in Siskiyou County, California, early on a spring morning before the sun cleared the cliff above. Made in a single frame at roughly fifteen seconds.
The falls are spring fed rather than stream fed. Groundwater from the aquifers around Mount Shasta emerges through lava tubes in the volcanic cliff and runs down a moss-covered face about 175 feet wide and 52 feet tall, entering the river in hundreds of separate threads. Because the source is groundwater rather than snowmelt, the falls run consistently through the year.
The subject is the moss-covered formation at the center of the frame, which reads as a seated figure with a bowed head and a folded arm. The name comes from that resemblance. The word Mossbrae combines the moss with brae, a Scots and Irish word for a steep hillside.
Most photographs have a subject somewhere in them. This one is a surface, and the subject is hidden in it.
That gives it an unusual way of behaving on a wall. From across a room it reads as texture, a green cliff running with water, immediately restful and asking nothing. Come closer and the figure separates from the moss, and once you have seen it you cannot stop seeing it. The photograph gives you two different experiences depending on where you stand, which means it holds up in a room you pass through and in a room you sit in, for different reasons.
On color it is the easiest piece here to place. Almost the entire frame is green, running from bright new moss where the light lands to deep shadow in the rock, with the falling water reading white and silver through it. There is no second hue to match against and nothing saturated enough to set a palette. It sits comfortably against warm neutrals, where the wood tones and the moss agree, and equally against cool gray and white, where it reads as depth rather than as color.
What it rewards is a wall people come near. The whole argument of the photograph is that something already present becomes available when you slow down in front of it, and a piece hung where nobody stops will only ever deliver the first half of that. A hallway you walk, a wall beside a chair, a spot at the end of a room you cross toward. Given somewhere to be approached, it does the thing it was made to do.
Related Reading: Where Attention Holds: The Quiet Pull of Soft Fascination
All three sizes shown to scale, sharing a common center line.
This photograph is offered in three sizes and four presentations, from $950 to $12,100. 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 × 32 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 five, the Intimate size is forty inches across and sixteen inches tall. That is a gentler proportion than a true three to one, so it holds together better in a smaller space, but it is still a wide piece and it still asks for a wall that can give it room. On most walls the Intimate reads as a horizontal accent rather than a focal point, which suits a hallway, a stairwell landing, or a space above a low console. The Collected and Statement sizes are where the width does the real work. 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.
Whether you find the figure. That is the honest answer. At forty by sixteen the center of the frame reads as a bright mound of moss among other mounds of moss, and most people will look straight past it, which is exactly what happened to me standing in front of it. At eighty by thirty two the shape resolves. The rounded crown separates from the shoulder beneath it, the arm folds over the knee, and the seated posture becomes obvious rather than suggested. The rest of the wall changes on the same curve. What reads small as green texture becomes hundreds of individual threads of water, each one traceable from where it leaves the rock to where it enters the river, with the moss showing its own structure behind them. This is a photograph about something being present before it is noticed, and size is what decides how much noticing the print allows. Why scale matters covers what happens perceptually when a landscape reaches the size where the eye has to travel across it.
Almost any of them, and that is not something I can say about most of the collection. The frame is green from edge to edge with the water running white and silver through it, and there is no second hue and nothing saturated enough to set a palette. Against warm neutrals the wood tones and the moss agree. Against cool gray and white it reads as depth rather than as color. It will not compete with a room that already has a scheme.
What it responds to is proximity. This is a photograph with something hidden in it, so a wall people come near will give you considerably more than one seen only from across a room. A hallway, a spot beside a chair, a wall at the end of a space you walk toward. Light helps too, since the moss and the water both hold their detail better in a well-lit room, but the piece has enough internal contrast to hold together in a dimmer one.
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.