This is the first of eight pictures in The Way to Zanscar. These images are from Ladakh and Zanscar, part of the Indian province of Jammu and Kashmir.

Ladakh is a desert high in the Himalayas where fuel is scarce. This picture was taken from a sand bar beside the Indus River, where I had been watching most of the inhabitants of the village of Saspol as they pulled driftwood from the river. Here the river takes a turn, and, when it rains or melts upstream and the river rises, villagers come here to gather firewood that is needed for the winter. The Buddhist burial monument above, called a chorten, has been undermined by heavy erosion along the riverbank, and the cavity has been repaired in an effort to postpone the inevitable.

When I begin printing a picture I work with a ruler and a calculator to determine the relationships of the elements in the composition. The structure of an image is something that I do intuitively in the field, by feel rather than thought, but the best images have a tight structure that is exact, and it is often useful to examine this before I make any slight adjustments that may be necessary to clean up an edge or level the horizon. Most images are used full-frame with no cropping at all. Here the top of the chorten is on the golden section both vertically and horozontally.

L1. The Cliff at Saspol

By the Indus river at Saspol, Ladakh, Jammu and Kashmir Province, India, August 1982, 35 mm Nikon F3, Nikkor lens, Ektachrome 200 film, Dye Transfer print 1993, ŠLuke Powell, 1996.