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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
meda
There’d been a fire and the building’s roof was gone. Debris covered the floor, and graffiti covered the walls. If it is possible for many layers of spray paint to hold up a damaged structure, that is very like what is happening here.
Niland, California
photographed 2.13.2022
appliances
A cotton gin and a clothes dryer, both abandoned. (But to be honest, if they hadn’t been abandoned, they would have held much less photographic interest.)
near Calipatria, California
photographed 2.12.2022
One Day | One Image 