Plate No. 03. Face Rock at first light, Bandon, Oregon — sunrise on the homelands of the Coquille people.
Vol 1.1 · Plate 03
Eyes to the Sky
A Bandon legend, shot at sunrise instead of sunset.
Most photographers shoot Face Rock at sunset. The light is dramatic but the rock itself ends up an afterthought. I wanted the rock to be the story — the way the Coquille people first told it. So I came at sunrise.
Face Rock sits offshore at Bandon, in the homelands of the Coquille (Nasomah) people. The local legend, passed down and reshaped over generations of both Native and non-Native storytellers, says the rock is the face of Princess Ewauna — a mountain chief's daughter who came to the coast for an intertribal feast and slipped away one night to swim under the moon.
When the ocean spirit rose to claim her, she refused to meet his gaze and kept her eyes fixed on the light above.
"She refused to meet his gaze and kept her eyes fixed on the light above."
By dawn, the story says, that moment was frozen in stone. Her upturned profile is the face you can see in the sea stack, surrounded by smaller rocks said to be her animal companions still keeping watch.
I wanted to photograph the legend, not the sunset. The morning warmed the rock from the east while the sky was still going through its full color shift — and you can feel the upward turn of the face holding fast to the light.
A story this place has been telling itself longer than any of us have been listening.
