The desert has a way of revealing truth. Beneath its blinding light, there is nowhere to hide, from the elements or from yourself.

I arrived at White Sands exhausted. The trip had already taken its toll, with a long, restless layover in Phoenix followed by the drive from El Paso across the desert. I was tired from traveling, but I was carrying another kind of weariness as well. Personal matters weighed heavily on me, and I had brought them into the desert whether I wanted to or not.

I have never felt the need to explain those circumstances. They belong to another time and place. What matters is that they were there, and eventually they found their way into the few words I wrote to accompany this photograph:

White Sands seemed an appropriate place for such thoughts. The dunes were luminous and seemingly endless. The air was still and dry, and the sun was fierce, absolute, almost merciless. There was extraordinary beauty everywhere, but it was not a gentle beauty. The landscape asked nothing of me except that I pay attention.

Perhaps that was exactly what I needed.

I intentionally pointed the camera toward the sun. I wanted its presence in the photograph, not simply as illumination, but as something almost physical. The light pours across the dune while every small ripple in the sand becomes more visible because of it. The same light that overwhelms the landscape also reveals it.

For this journey I traveled lightly, carrying my three Sigma DP Merrill cameras and a Sony NEX 7. Unmerciful Sun was made with the Sony and my favorite 16 to 70mm f/4 ZA OSS lens. I bracketed the exposure in two stop intervals, and the plus two frame gave me what I wanted: enough radiance to convey the intensity of the sun while retaining the delicate texture of the dune. Flare was expected from photographing directly into the light and was later carefully removed in Lightroom.

The technical part was simple. No elaborate setup. No filters. No stitching. Just a camera, a landscape, and intuition.

That simplicity is one reason the photograph has remained important to me. The other has very little to do with photography.

I can return to this image and remember what it felt like to stand there. I remember the exhaustion and the ache, but I also remember continuing to walk. Somewhere within that enormous landscape, making photographs became less about escaping what I was feeling and more about allowing myself to feel it.

Photography sometimes does that for us.

We go into the world intending to make a picture of what is in front of us, only to discover years later that we also made a picture of something happening within us. The camera records the light falling upon the landscape. Without quite realizing it, we may be recording our own inner weather as well.

Unmerciful Sun was made in 2013. I no longer inhabit the moment that created it, but I have never lost my connection to the photograph.

Perhaps that is why we make things during difficult times. Pain passes, lives change, and years accumulate. The photograph remains.

And sometimes, when we need it, it leads us back through the desert and reminds us that we kept walking.