This was one of the coldest days in the field that I can remember. It was probably around 30 degrees below zero when the crew assembled on the lake below the Tetons just after dawn. Initially I was hoping for the low cloud to clear to unveil the grandeur of the mountain range behind, but it just lingered.
After some very necessary shots of whisky, we decided to work with what we had and to use the rather ethereal light to our advantage. Stories from the Wild West should not always be played against towering monoliths marooned in scorching deserts; the final frontier could also be cold and disorientating.
Hautpaw - my Native American talent - was an excellent and stoic muse. We really could not ask him to spend more than five minutes at a time on his horse as he was so exposed to the cold. He makes the photograph. That’s the challenge of employing negative space; the image is vulnerable if the subject is anything less than perfect.
He painted himself and was dead proud of the end result. If I were a settler in the Northern Rockies in 1880 and Hautpaw emerged through the freezing fog in this manner, I think I would need more than a whisky.
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