C&O Canal at Great Falls

Author's Comments

Most people at Great Falls never look at the canal. They walk past it on their way to the overlook, which is fair enough, because the falls are the falls. But the locks themselves are one of the quieter pleasures in the whole park, and I have made photographs along that towpath that I care about more than anything I have ever shot of the water. The stonework is the thing. These walls were cut and fitted in the 1830s and they have held, and the surface now reads as a kind of slow record - lichen, water stain, the marks of two centuries of freeze and thaw. In late October, when the hardwoods above the canal turn and the afternoon light comes in low along the towpath, the whole corridor goes warm and the still water in the locks picks up the color overhead. The reflections are the photograph. You need a day without wind, which is easier in fall than in spring, and you need to be there within an hour of sunset. I tend to walk south from the visitor center first because the locks are closer together and the light falls more cleanly on the west-facing walls. The lock house sits low and square against the trees, and there is a composition there - the geometry of worked stone against the soft mess of the woods behind - that I have made half a dozen times and will make again. This is not a place that announces itself. You have to slow down to see what it is. That is most of why I keep coming back.

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