The Totem Pole Under the Milky Way

You can’t just drive to this one. The Totem Pole and the spires around it sit deep in the Monument Valley backcountry, on Navajo land you don’t get to wander into on your own. To stand here at night you go in with a Navajo guide who knows the way and has every right to say no. I went on a photographers’ trip led by one, out past the parts of the valley the tour vans reach, to a place I’d only ever seen in other people’s photographs.

We came in after dark. The guide brought us out to the spires and gave us time to work, and the desert did the rest. The Milky Way rose right behind the towers, the core burning pink and gold over rock that has stood there longer than I can really hold in my head. I’ve shot dark skies in a lot of places. Very few of them feel like this, where the sky, the ground, and the fact that you were allowed to be there all land on you at once.

I’m an outsider here and I know it. The photograph is the easy part to keep. The rest of it matters more: I only got to make this because someone whose home this is chose to bring me out into the dark, under all of that.

More of my work is at imagesbyericbrown.com , and I post more of this work on Instagram .