Blog Archives
let’s pray
This used to be a fancy downtown hotel, the In Town Inn.
These days it’s neither fancy nor a hotel, which is of course the very reason my camera and I paid it a visit.
Lubbock, Texas
photographed 4.17.2022
dashboard
This stretch limo has been parked next to a vacant building for years. Both, of course, have their best days far, far in the past. I was downtown the other Sunday afternoon (you know why) and took a look at the limo; after all these years of kind-of seeing it, it seemed like it was about damn time I went in for a closer look. In addition to many pounds of bird shit splattered all over it, there was a nice array of a shattered driver’s side window, a felt cowboy coat, a bible, and Spanish dictionary, a red crayon, and a granola bar. That seems like a lot of narratives all congregating in one location, doesn’t it?
Lubbock, Texas
photographed 4.17.2022
*UPDATE* Two days ago, I drove by this location and the car was gone. Good thing I finally got around to photographing it.
i will never understand what’s left behind
I have looked inside a lot of abandoned places, and have photographed all of them. And I do not – and likely never will – understand why some things get left behind.
Did they intend to come back and get the rest of their things? Or did they just say fuck it and walk away from failure, hoping that maybe on another day in another town, they’d get a new coffee cup? Or whatever.
Puerto de Luna, New Mexico
photographed 3.24.2018
upon layer
Back when I thought I was going to be a poet, I submitted some poems for a critique. One of the poems was titled “Deserts Always Win” – I’d written it after a drive through the deserts around Victorville, California, where I saw lots and lots of remnants of things that hadn’t worked out – homes, businesses, dreams. And – unlike places with heavy vegetation – plants didn’t grown up over the left-overs, so the defeat was always in clear view of anyone who bothered to look. Apparently, the person who critiqued my work had not ever been to a desert; they took very strong exception to my title and to the premise of the poem.
I’m not saying that unfavorable critique led directly to my becoming a photography. I am also not saying that it didn’t play a part…
Anyway, here’s a hulking ruin in eastern New Mexico; it appears to my photographic eye that once again, the desert was victorious. (Poetic me still stands by that, too.)
Chaves County, New Mexico
photographed 5.23.2021
that welcome seems a bit worn out
Well, sure, the sign DOES say “welcome.” But there isn’t really anything else around to support that, is there?
Irony, I guess.
Roswell, New Mexico
photographed 5.22.2021
One Day | One Image 