Faces

This bearded gentleman looks severely pained at having been left out in the desert for millions of years without a body to keep him company. Dorothea took his picture in Arches National Park.

If the gentleman above is disgruntled, this goblin is hopping mad. Another photo from Arches. It’s probably a good thing we can’t hear what he’s shouting.

Here’s another unfortunate who apparently lost control of his temper and got petrified before he could regain it. Arches is obviously teeming with dissatisfied inmates.

Admittedly, this is a less well-defined face than some of the others, but look at what the poor fellow has to put up with. Not only has he been incorporated into one of the Garden of the Gods’ bulwarks, but either he’s roaring about the injustice of this fate, or else he's trying to cough up a big stone. I think we should be willing to cut him a little slack.

The Eye of Canyon de Chelly is upon you! ...OK, one eye isn’t a face, but this one is so real (at least in the light I happened to take the picture in) that it surely deserves to be here. Perhaps it belongs to a supervisory or guardian spirit rather than a suffering monster—the Navajo make such connections with greater skill than we do.

This big formation in Canyon de Chelly has at least three faces that I can identify: one scowling off to the left, another grimacing to the lower right, and just above this one, a placid domestic animal. There may be an even bigger face that contains some of the others, but I can’t quite put it together.

An air of confusion dominates the composition—there even seems to be a misplaced ear on the forehead of the face at the bottom right. Picasso did this kind of thing much better.

A happy face at last! Actually, it’s in the Colorado National Monument, so we saw it at the beginning of the trip—they were all downers from that point on. But I wanted to end on an upbeat note, so here he is at the end.

Of course, this guy is made of wood, so although he‘s no youngster by our standards, he’s junior to all the rock stars above on this page by at least a few hundred million years. That might account, at least in part, for his good mood.

Still, one is inclined to wonder what really accounts for the cheerful look—is it lighthearted dolphin playfulness, or sinister crocodilian guile? Maybe he’s just trying to lure us a little closer to those impressive jaws....