"I'd just get up in the morning and follow the clouds," Kennedy said. "There were times I didn't know where I was going or even where I ended up. I'd just boogie out until the dark and then wonder where I was. It was a great catharsis from day-to-day life".

He traveled highways and back roads from Santa Fe to Gallup driving through places he doesn't remember. "The first day I almost got killed," Kennedy said. "I was paying more attention to the sky than the other drivers. I found myself helpless to look anywhere but up. Everywhere I looked, the splendor of the New Mexico skies engulfed me. I obsessed with photographing the flowing forms."

The prints measure five and one-half by seven inches. Each is handprinted by Kennedy and then matted. This edition consists of 20 portfolios.

Once his hiatus was over, he put the project on the back burner. "I had other work to do," he said. "And I find after I finish shooting, I often lose interest. I know what the results will look like. I don't have to make the prints. I find after a few months I then come back to the work with a renewed interest."

Then his 21-year-old daughter, Tymara, was killed in an automobile accident. "When she died, I just felt this would be a present to her," he said. "It became a focal point." In the photographer's statement Kennedy dedicates the work to her: "May she ever be among the clouds."

A barefoot, blue-jeaned Kennedy, relaxing on a five-foot wood bench in the kitchen of his 100-year-old adobe home in Cerrillos, didn't look like an 18-year veteran of the photographic wars of New York City.

There, he snapped advertising and fashion photographs but made his name in album covers.