Guiding Light

Fifteen years ago I saw Scott's photograph of this lens for the first time. The way he'd handled the light, the way the lens itself became the architecture of the frame — I remember standing in front of it and thinking that I hoped, eventually, I might be good enough to be allowed to make a photograph like this one. I didn't say it out loud. I'm not sure I even fully said it to myself. But the thought was there. Scott is gone now. He passed before I made this image. The Fresnel lens at Yaquina Head has been guiding ships since the 1870s. It is, to use a phrase that doesn't get used often enough, a working antique. The glass weighs more than most pickup trucks. It's surrounded by single-pane windows that have been there longer than every photographer who has ever wanted to be in this room. And it is still — quietly, faithfully — doing its job every night. The access took years to arrange. Inside the lantern room you have maybe two feet of working space. You cannot touch anything. You are very high up. The light fails fast at sunset, and when it's gone, the access is gone. I worked quickly. The one difference between Scott's photograph and mine is that I got lucky. He shot his at a flat hour. I had a sunset coming through the window. The lens caught the warm light and refracted it across every prism, and the Pacific opened up behind the glass, and I had maybe twenty minutes before the light shifted. This is the photograph I waited fifteen years to take.