Blog Archives

trailers (now deceased)

There isn’t a whole lot going on in Montoya, New Mexico, at the current time. Unless you count the abandonment of buildings and trailers, and then there is a lot happening. (But the pace at which things happen is quite slow.)

Montoya, New Mexico
photographed 5.29.2022

despair has its own rhythm

Every single thing here just looks like despair – the weeds are closing in on the building; most of the windows are boarded up; that porch roof is wavy and collapsing; there’s an abandoned car out back; the stucco is working hard to fall away from the walls. And there are signs telling us that adobe is political.

Marfa, Texas
photographed 1.15.2023

exhaustion staggers on

I don’t know what this building used to be; all I know is what it is now. And what it is now is abandoned and vandalized. The building seems exhausted by its defeat.

It exhausted me, too, and all I did was stop by for a few photos.

Pecos, Texas
photographed 1.14.2023

light giving way to darkness

So what happened was that I signed up for an online photography class with a theme of “cold.” Most of the participants, I figured, would be from New England and have actual cold to photograph. I decided the challenge of shooting images on the theme of cold in a mild Texas winter was something I was up for. I spend the two week time that we had to make our images shooting concepts of cold, rather than actual cold. Honestly, while the images themselves were OK, as concepts to illustrate the theme, they were…what’s the term I’m looking for here?…weak. They were weak. They were weak in the extreme.

And then, the very day that we were supposed to turn in our three images for a critique, I woke to actual cold, actual still-falling snow. And I re-shot the assignment.

This is an abandoned cotton gin. I mean, at this time of year, they are all abandoned because the ginning season is over, but this one seems to be permanently abandoned.

Lubbock County, Texas
photographed 1.24.2023

light plant

This old place is just up a hill from my grandparents’ house.

Or, to be more accurate, it’s up the hill from where I think my grandparents lived. We didn’t visit them often and my memories of where their house was and what it looked like didn’t exactly line up with the on-the-ground reality that I saw on a visit there last year. (Exactly one year ago, actually). I sort of thought I’d get close to their old place and some sort of Family Magic would pull me toward the correct house, but what actually happened is that I didn’t feel one single thing, so I shrugged and realized once again that we were not that sort of family who stuck together or who had that sort of family magic; and then I drove up the hill and found the old power plant.

Sonora, Texas
photographed 1.27.2022