Just finishing my book about America, One Nation.  I’ll be publishing the images and text here, page by page.  This is the cover.

Breezed through the back alleys of Hollywood today, shooting on the go.  Shot a bunch of fun stuff, we’ll do more later this week.

I look for relationships.  I like when the elements of the image illuminate each other, and create a whole much greater than any one of the single parts.

Conversely, I also like to focus on a single element, and let the rest of the emptiness in the image refocus attention on that original element.  A meditation, as it were.

I took this picture in South Dakota, at Custer State Park.

You know, the burros here, they aren’t in the brochure, if you know what I mean. You go here for the bison.

And the bison, they are impressive. I drove along looking, for them. You see poop, and tracks, and you get excited, hoping to see a herd stretched out across a distant hill, maybe even a close hill. Anything, just a chance to get a sense of what the land felt like when bison roamed here unfettered. You see a stray cow, maybe a bull that is doing poorly, and then suddenly you drive into the whole herd.

Bam.

Bison everywhere. Strung across the road, uncountable numbers of them. You aren’t going anywhere; there’s bison blocking the road, males bellowing at you, refusing to let you pass. And yes, you get a distant sense, a faded, dying echo of what the vast herds must have once been.

The bulky, belligerent males stop your car, and let you know you aren’t welcome. And this is it with bison, I get them, I understand them.

They don’t like you. They don’t want you there. They want you to leave.

I get that.

And so, we have the burros, in the same vast parkland. Moving through the same short grass plains, grazing on the same wooded hills.

Feral burros. Invasive. Introduced. They don’t belong here. A junk animal.

Junk or not, they are protected in the park. And they flourish.

I spoke of uncounted numbers of bison. Well, I didn’t count them. But somebody does. Each year, they are rounded up and tagged, carefully logged and recorded. as they should be; they are valuable, important, and worthy of being tracked.

Does anyone count the burros? I don’t know, I doubt they go unnoticed by park biologists. But they aren’t rounded up and tagged each year.

On a cloudy, dark morning I drove along a road thick with trees; up and down the hills, and in a dense thicket suddenly drove into a herd of burros.

I have in my head that I was going to see Mount Rushmore, but I could be wrong.

With my wife in the car, I pulled to the side of the road and looked out at them.

The burro herd stretched out on one side of the narrow road; the morning cool and damp, the trees close, suffocating. The sky only dark shaggy clouds draped low over scant cracks between thick, laden leaves.

Some stood scant feet from the car.

The burros, stolid, indifferent perhaps, yet watching as other cars slowed and stopped in this dark, one lane place to slowly shuffle by, threading through oncomers and heading on. I watched them, took some pictures, then chanced getting out of the car.

The burros, a mixture of jacks, jennys and foals, stood motionless, silent. Like walking standing within a grove of Joshua trees at dusk, or hands held still at evensong in a cathedral; I looked at them. They could have been tombs in a Savannah graveyard, draped in Spanish moss and fog. Silent, eternal.

I took pictures, profanely.

And the burros were buddha.

The herd stretched on, some by the road, ears slowly flicking. Others lying in the dirt, casual. Still others drifted away into the woods, half vanished in darkness.

The pictures, of course were crap. The stillness, the silence – every picture gives you that. But life rarely does.

I met, here, the unphotographable. The unphotogenic moment. The ant-Kodak moment.

Fair enough.

I stood in an eerie reverence I cannot photograph and cannot describe.

I got back in the car and drove off with my wife, both of us well aware of where we had just been,

And so, the lesser picture.

And yet, not a lesser moment, but a lesser picture than the one I had hoped to take.

I traveled alone the next day, looking for bison, and found more burros.

A nice herd, along the road, with cars parked, and people mingling with the herd, excited and pleased. It seems to me some were feeding the burros, else how did they get so close? I saw people close, even touching I think, although I’m not really sure. I got out of the car and joined them, and photographed people with the burros. I photographed two pretty girls with a burro, although, really, the one was much prettier than the other, but isn’t it always that way? Yes, I know, how Garry Winogrand of me, but how can you go wrong with a picture of a pretty girl or two? And yet, that is not the picture I show you.

The herd moved on, people got back in their cars, the moment passed.

And yet I lingered.

Two burros lagged behind. I photographed one, moving with it along a small creek, a shallow ravine. Then headed back, toward the other, toward the picture you see here, yet to happen.

I don’t remember, now, if I approached it, or it approached me. Probably a bit of both, who knows?

I understand bison. They want me gone.

The burro, the burro and I looked at each other.

I offered no food.

Did it want food? Of course.

But instead we looked at each other.

An animal mind, an alien mind gazed at me; placidly, perhaps warily, but only in the most casual sense. I know what the bison thinks when it sees me, but this burro, this foreign thing; I am a different creature to it.

I cannot see myself in its eyes.

We stood together, silently. I stood with kings and counselors, eternity in a quietly clutched breath or two. And the burro?

I took its picture.