The Black Place 5A

A dramatic uplift of the land fifty million years ago and extensive erotion have exposed and juxtaposed the variety of elements that characterize the "Black Place" in the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness in northern New Mexico. Artist Walter Nelson composes a kind of sunrise on the horizon by framing a boulder of yellow sandstone against the slope of a dark and pebbly volcanic surface that painter Georgia O'Keeffe described as looking like a mile of elephants. After moving to northern New Mexico in 1982, Nelson originally gravitated to the site because of its significance to O'Keeffe, seeking out some of the formations she had painted. But he soon forged his own relationship with the landscape and photographed it over the course of thirty years.