Transcript of Late Night Stroll

The Story Behind the Photograph ‘Late Night Stroll”

by Josh Thompson (Transcript of Audio Recording)

I would say that more interesting than how I was able to get the effect that is displayed in the photograph is the story of how I happened to be in Arches National Park to take that photograph in July of 2016.

If I recall correctly, I was working a job that summer, and I think I got off work around 7 pm in the middle of the week. I knew that I had the next day off, but then I had to work the day following. So I got home and I watched a movie and I was bored. Just inordinately bored. And I wanted to do something significant with the day off that I had. So 2:15 am rolls around (it might have been 2 am) and I decide on a whim that I am going to drive from where I am in South Denver to Arches National Park for a camping trip.

By 3 am, I have left home and am on the highway to drive to Utah. I drive throughout the morning. I get there around 9 or 10. I pick up some supplies in Moab and then go up into Arches. I camp out, I set up a campsite by 1 pm or something like that. Then this wave of exhaustion hits me and I try to take a nap. Mind you, this is Utah, specifically the Arches desert, in the middle of July. So when I get back to my campsite after walking around a little bit and try and lay down to sleep, it’s probably a solid 105°, and I am camping on slick rock with no shade. I spend about an hour and a half, maybe two hours in like a feverish dream state, halfway in between some sort of rest state and this sweaty hellish nightmare of an experience. I decide that camping is not really gong to work out, mostly because the wind did actually cause one of my tent poles to snap while I was trying to sleep in this very hot desert.

I pack all my gear back in, hike it back out to my car, pick up maybe 2 ½ hours of sleep in my car, and then sunset rolls around. I do the sunset on the cliffs, I take some photos of arches, I climb up onto an arch over in some areas, and eat some food. Then I get back into my car, and I go over to a parking lot, and I wait out for the moon to rise so that I can do a midnight hike at Delicate Arch.

Me being the wonderful planner that I am, I have not brought any sort of headgear or any sort of lighting for late night walks. I get to the parking lot for Delicate Arches hike, and it’s like 12:30 am at this point. The moon was probably nearly full if not actually full, so there was quite a bit of light from that. But everybody else that was at the parking lot had like full headgear, industrial strength flashlights: they were all decked out. But there was just me with my camera gear, walking with no light (chuckles). I decided I didn’t want to look like a newbie or like a scrub, so I opted not to use the flashlight on my phone, mostly because I wanted to conserve the battery as well.

So I made this relatively dangerous and long hike out to Delicate Arch with no lighting whatsoever. I actually got lost at one point and ended up sort of walking along the rim of probably like a 125-150 foot cliff that was pretty steep (chuckles) and getting to the end and realizing, “Hmmm. This is not the path.”

I get back on it and I start hiking toward Delicate. I see Delicate and I climb up and get to the spot overlooking Delicate Arch, and it’s beautiful. There are about 25-30 people sitting underneath Delicate Arch. Coincidentally enough (chuckles), some guy has either a ukulele or a guitar and they are singing, literally, “Kumbaya” at close to 2 am in the morning, under this bright moon, under Delicate Arch, in the middle of nowhere. It’s just the most hilarious thing to me.

But Delicate Arch is beautiful in the moonlight, and I take a few photos. But I realize it’s not necessarily the most fulfilling photograph that I’m getting. So I go about 200 meters back on the trail to Delicate Arch. It was sort of a cliffside trail that was rimming this high wall on the right side when you’re walking towards Delicate Arch. So about 200 meters back along the trail (as you can see in the photo), there is this bend where you cannot see the other side of the pathway. And I thought, not only is this a well-orchestrated photo, and honestly better than what I was getting at Delicate Arch, it sort of illustrates what is more important to me about taking these photos and making these journeys in the first place.

It’s not necessarily always about the end goal, about the final product that you are searching for. Delicate Arch was 200 meters beyond this photo, but in this photo, you were on the path to Delicate Arch. To me, that represented that the journey and the experience along the way to your final product is oftentimes going to have several twists. It’s not going to have a definite, finite end goal in sight. It’s going to have twists and turns, just like the trip that I had been on that day had a bunch of twists and turns. And realistically, that is going to be the more meaningful experience that you’ll have than seeing the final end goal.

And I didn’t exactly plan to have a hiker to walk into the frame because it was about a 20 second exposure. I didn’t expect the hiker with a headlamp to walk into the frame, but it just illustrated the same thing. And it was also hilarious that I didn’t have my own headgear (chuckles).

As to what moves or inspires me the most when it comes to my medium and one of my favorite motifs, I would say one of my principal interests in taking a photograph, whether it be a landscape or a portrait or whatever I’m doing is less so to sort of construct a canvas, like you would find with a painter or like you might find with a sketch artist or a lot of other photographers even. It’s less to me about creating my snapshot, and it’s more important to me to approach the situation as being a ‘fly on the wall’ documentarian. With me, I think it’s far more important to sort of snap one little aspect of an interaction or one little aspect of a scene, exactly how it appears and exactly how it would appear to other people.

So I rarely pose people. I rarely will go into post-production and clear up the environment to make it less cluttered or anything like that. I think there’s a very important aspect to each part of the photograph, whether it be an imperfection or a perfection. Whether it be a sort of goofy expression on the model. I think it’s all about that documentarian take, and that’s very important to me.

As to this piece specifically, what does it mean to me? I touched on that earlier when I was talking about it being representative of the entire journey, of the trip that you’re taking to get to an eventual destination. And I thought that was remarkably representative of a lot of the pieces and a lot of the work that I tend to produce (and that I’ve tended to produce over the last 2-3 years). And to me, that was indicative of me as a whole and my work. I have great landscapes and deserts, and I have great portraits of people, but I don’t think they convey the same overarching idea. They are just technically beautiful. I wanted something that was an idea. Not just a great shutter speed, a good aperture, and a nice background.