Blog Archives
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
boys at play (beside World War II ruins)
As unbelievable as it seems to someone whose city was never bombed, there are still building ruins in the heart of Palermo left over from 1943, when Allied and German forces battled for control of the island. (Read more here.)
One of the ruins was very near where we stayed, and the wire fencing on the left side of the photo surrounds the rubble. But, even with war ruins that are almost eighty years old, life in the rest of the neighborhood goes on, with boys playing a made-up game as two young women strolled along. (And as a quartet of photographers watched and, possibly, made more than a few images.)
Palermo, Sicily
photographed 8.31.2022
gone to the dogs
There was only one reason I came here: I wanted to see what a place called “Nimrod” looked like. Mostly it looked like a church and a cemetery.
But there was this abandoned building; the sign over the door was illegible, so I don’t know what it was. But it was something related to dogs, and to trophies of dogs, and even a dog mural. Somehow these context clues made more mysterious.
Nimrod, Texas
photographed 8.7.2022
