There's two challenges.
One, following this wonderful set of readings, and two,
having to talk about photographs that you haven't
seen an d trying to evoke them.
I'll be very brief.
I'll give you a little bit of history.
When I first started to photograph seriously
about 25 years ago, I started quickly
visiting the various touchstones of Western landscape
photography in which Canyon de Chelly surely is one.
But very soon after getting photographed in there,
I felt that I was taking something from the land
rather than expressing something about it.
And I felt I needed to be not only in the land,
but to try to at least get to know the people.
And my wife, Karen, and I spent two summers teaching at what
was then Navajo Community College and now is Diné
College.
And using the time in between teaching math to try to get
a deeper sense of what Tséyi' and Tsaile and the county were
about.
And what I tried to do with my images, first to react to it,
I feel, emotionally, which is a strong response to the rhythms
that are imposed by my wife or that the land revealed
or what the colors revealed in the land.
And so the images, if you can imagine them,
are fragments of the canyon.
We're try to capture those rhythms to which I respond.
And I hope that what the photographs in ensemble capture
is something approaching the stories that come from Laura,
which are, in fact, fragments which put together
allow you to [INAUDIBLE] get a sense of place,
a feeling for it, and a feeling for an emotional reaction
to it.
If you want to see what the photographs kind of look like,
there was a book that I had the good fortune of collaborating
on, with Joy Harjo, called Secrets
from the Center of the World.
And some of the images that appear
there are at least similar in many ways to what was--
what I've tried to do in Canyon de Chelly.
But the ones from the canyon are a little bit different,
because there's very different approaches I took.
And finally comes out about a year or a year and a half ago.
I at least hope that the images match the poetry.
[APPLAUSE]