There is something reassuring about mountains. We look at them and imagine permanence. They were here before us and, we assume, will remain long after we're gone.

But nothing in this photograph is still.

The water is moving constantly. The trees grow, fall and decay. The exposed roots in the foreground once belonged beneath the earth, anchoring a living tree. Now they sit at the water's edge, slowly being changed by weather and time.

Even the mountains are moving, although on a timescale we cannot easily comprehend.

I made this photograph using a long exposure. There's an irony in that. The movement of the water has been transformed into something calm and almost motionless. Photography has taken a landscape in constant transition and created the illusion of permanence.

Perhaps that's part of why we make photographs.

We notice something knowing, consciously or otherwise, that we will never see it in precisely the same way again. The light will change. The water will move. Things will disappear. We will change too.

So we place a frame around a fraction of a second—or several minutes—and keep it.

Not because we've stopped time.

But because, briefly, we noticed it passing. It becomes a memory.

Nothing here is still.

And perhaps that's what makes it worth looking at.