ANTELOPE CANYON: A PORTFOLIO
THE ARTISTRY OF NATURE WHISPERING
In 2025, my wife and I took what is going to be our last trip to the USA, for the foreseeable future at least. During this trip, we went back to many of the locations we know so well, for one last round of photography and a goodbye. One of these locations was Antelope Canyon, a magical place that I am never tired to revisit.
The first time we explored and photographed Antelope Canyon, both its Upper and Lower section, was in 2010. I took photo tours on both sections and simply loved it: having all the time in the world to photograph, together with the possibility of using a tripod, made all the difference. Over the last 15 years, we have been privileged to be able to revisit Antelope Canyon multiple times, going back both to Upper and Lower, as well as visiting some of the newly opened sections of the Canyon to add to what has become over the years a growing Antelope Portfolio.
No matter how many times we went back, each time we couldn’t help but be amazed at the power of nature. Water and time togeter sculpted the rock walls that embraced us during our many visits, giving the Navajo sandstone the most incredible shapes.
Sculptures of abstract, surreal flowing curves, of human figures, animals, mountains, rivers; all those and more are there for the eyes willing to see them leaping into life from the canyon’s walls.
Antelope Canyon’s walls are of many shades of yellow, oranges and reds, and the sunlight coming in graces the different depths of the canyon walls with unique shades of colours and levels of saturation.
Over the years, I photographed Antelope Canyon in so many ways. Early on, I enjoyed the opportunity of using a tripod; in more recent visits, I embraced the challenge of portraying Antelope’s beauty handholding the camera, using the canyon’s walls to help me stabilise it when needed.
In time, I moved from celebrating the sandstone’s colour, paying the glorious palette its dues, to enjoying investigating what to me feels like the truer nature of Antelope Canyon and its spirits in black and white.
What I never did, however, was surrender to the gimmicky, overused cliché of throwing sand in the air to create fake “ghosts”; the real ones, the ones who whisper to you when you are walking the canyon, have always been enough for me.
Landscape photography is one of the most wondrous, powerful ways to tell stories about our planet, and ultimately about ourselves. In years of increasing loudness, where people feel like they must be heard at all costs and where social media reduced our attention span to seconds, thus increasing the need for visual loudness in order to be seen, I found my soul truly feeling at home only by going obstinately in the opposite direction.
In Antelope Canyon, this meant turning my attention to the whispers of the inner sandstone landscape, the ones that can be heard only after looking past the oversaturated colours and after forgetting the gimmicks and clichés. In 2010, during our first visit, I already had a glimpse of that (see ANTELOPE CANYON’S SPIRITS); after that, I alternated colour and black & white work, moving more and more towards a pure black & white, barebone approach to photography in general and Antelope in particular.
I do appreciate, of course, that the above is just my own way to what I assume is the common goal of all of us visual interpreters of the landscape – transmitting the most powerful and personal interpretations of the world in front of us. We all find our own path, as we progress along our journey with photography, and this is where mine led me to.
As a result, in 2025 I went one step farther and decided to bring just a fixed-lens Fujifilm GFX100RF into the canyon. As well, I decided to try and create a Portfolio of square images only, since square felt the best image ratio to maximise the abstract power of Antelope’s whispers. Before heading down into the narrow walls of the canyon, I set the screen preview to black & white and the ratio to square. One focal length, one image ratio, unlimited shades of grey: I was ready to listen.
The visit resulted in a 9-image strong Portfolio of square images, plus three more photographs that I decided to leave in a different image ratio. First, here you’ll find the Portfolio for you to enjoy (click on the images to enlarge):
Then, the three extra photographs (click on the images to enlarge):
All photographs created in November 2025 with a Fujifilm GFX100RF and processed in Photoshop. Thank you for joining me on this trip to Antelope Canyon, it has been a pleasure to share this Portfolio with you!
Thank you for reading this post, I hope you enjoyed it! Why don’t you share it with your friends, or drop me a comment to let me know your thoughts about this?
2 thoughts on “ANTELOPE CANYON: A PORTFOLIO”
What a wonderful album. The images are striking and full of drama in black and white, I may even prefer it to color images.
Hello Anne,
great to see you here, hope you are doing well and thank you for your comment, I am glad you enjoyed Antelope in B&W!
Best regards,
Vieri