Tallulah Gorge

Tallulah Gorge cuts nearly a thousand feet into the mountains of northeast Georgia — one of the deepest gorges in the eastern United States, carved by the Tallulah River through hard quartzite over millions of years. A series of waterfalls drops through the gorge in quick succession, and a chain of them gave the place its early fame as the "Niagara of the South" before upstream dams reduced the flow.

Photographed in 2010 in black and white during a trip through the southern mountains. The gorge is all vertical drama — sheer rock walls, falling water, the river far below — and it reads powerfully in monochrome, where the contrast between dark stone and white water does the work.