Extract Dune #4 White Sands, NM 2003

Over the winter I decided it was time take some photographic projects from the “idea” stage to the finished work stage. Let’s face it, they are all works of genius until you have to get down to the editing process and if you are disciplined, you approach this part of the work flow as if it is not your work and you are just the magazine editor or art director.

I make project oriented photography now as a matter of course and find that this kind of “assignment from within” way of working has grown my seeing and storytelling skills to a new level. This was not always the case and there are some projects that started out as just something that interested me that I would return to from time to time. In this example, you look back at the end of the path and see a project you didn’t see in the beginning.

Such was the case with my sand dunes. This subject is one that is almost like a compulsory for landscape photographers and I began to work with it from the time I owned a camera. My first National Park experience was as a small boy on trips to New Mexico to visit family. We visited White Sands National Monument and I was immediately captivated. Later in life I began to approach White Sands, Death Valley, and the Great Sand Dunes as serious photographic studies. I found in the dunes the same patterns and repetition that I had experienced in music and felt at once at home with this subject. Like music, it can appear to be the same yet there are ever changing subtleties and as the composer you can decide where the viewers attention will go in the image.

When I made the decision to submit a portfolio of dunes for Black and White Magazines Portfolio Contest I had the difficult task of editing 15 years worth of work down to a 12-image portfolio. The first couple of editing rounds were fairly easy and I resolved to do this kind of objective editing more often. The agonizing part was getting a group of 21 down to 12 images. What I found was two very distinct portfolios: one more traditional (the first one I posted this spring), and this portfolio of abstract dunes.

I was honored and humbled to have my Abstract Dune portfolio chosen as one of 30 Spotlight Award Winners out of 685 entries from around the world. I will post one new image from this 8-picture portfolio each week this summer. You can read the interview and view 5 of the images in the September Issue of Black and White magazine, available on newsstands in July.

Chris Coffey
June 2010