Jefferson Memorial

Author's Comments

The reflection is the photograph, and the reflection requires stillness, and stillness requires you to arrive before the joggers and the strollers and the tour groups who come later with their coffee and their reasonable expectations. I mean five-thirty in the morning. I mean March, when the air is cold enough that your breath shows and the cherry blossoms are just beginning to loosen. Stand on the opposite shore. Not at the memorial itself, but across the basin where the path curves and the whole dome opens up before you, columns and all, doubled in the water below. At blue hour the dome goes luminous before the sky does. There is a brief window, maybe twelve minutes, when the memorial is brighter than the light above it and the reflection in the basin is almost more convincing than the structure itself. The blossoms complicate everything in the best way. They do not frame the dome so much as they crowd around it, soft and a little insistent, and the dome endures them with great patience. Late March is my preference over peak bloom. The color is concentrated, the sky cooperates more often, and the crowds have not yet reached their full conviction. Come back in the same spot at different moments of that morning and you will make three different photographs. The basin is mercurial. A bird lands, a ripple crosses, the wind picks up from the south, and the reflection dissolves. Then it returns. Patience is not optional here. It is the technique.

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