The Elk of Tomales Point

The walk out is a few miles or more of trail unspooling along the spine of the headland before the land gives anything up. And at first it gives up nothing. The elk are there, but you don't see them; one could be bedded down in the brush just beyond a hillside, a few yards off the trail, and you'd pass without ever knowing. It takes a slow eye, a patient gaze to notice the shape that isn't grass — the curve of a back, an ear that turns, an antler barely sticking above the gold grass.

Then you find one bedded low, and then another, and the whole hillside quietly reorganizes itself around them. Higher up, where the ridge gives way to nothing but sky and the ocean falling away behind it, the bulls stand: heavy-antlered, unbothered, magnificent in the plain way that wild things are magnificent. I have photographed a lot of landscapes in California. I'm not sure I've stood anywhere that felt more like the edge of something — so isolated, yet so free.

Why this place

What makes these animals worth the long hike through the fog and the longer wait for the right light is that they almost weren't here at all. The tule elk is endemic to California, found nowhere else on earth, and by the 1870s hunting and the spread of California agriculture had very nearly erased them. For a while they were thought gone entirely, surviving only as a tiny remnant on a Central Valley ranch. The whole subspecies threaded through the eye of that needle — and now here they live, on the edge of the world, surrounded by sea.

In 1978, about ten of them were brought back to Tomales Point. The herd I was photographing that afternoon is what grew from those ten — a population restored to a place it had grazed for thousands of years before we arrived. So when I lifted the camera, I wasn't only chasing a handsome animal in good light. I was photographing a comeback. That, to me, is what the frame had to hold: not just the elk, but the improbability of the elk still being there to photograph.

From the field to the frame

Back at the studio is where the second half of the work begins, and it's the half most people never see. Out of everything I shot that afternoon, one frame kept pulling me back — the way the light caught the ridge of the antlers, the pair of heads gazing off toward the vast ocean going soft behind them. Choosing it is its own discipline; a body of work is defined as much by what you leave out as by what you keep.

Then comes the part I care about most. I printed it myself, here in our San Francisco studio — proofing the color, choosing the Hahnemühle paper, watching the first full-size print come off the printer and taking in every detail at scale. And then the frame: this is the first production frame for the edition, cut and joined and finished by hand at our bench. The same hands that shot on that edge of the headland made the object you'd hang on your wall. That isn't something we're willing to compromise — and it's the whole reason Photo & Craft exists.