Blog Archives
It was one of those days
There are days when every single thing I see seems like it ought to be a photograph. Those days can be mentally exhausting. But they can be – and usually are – exhilarating. Those are the days when I just know that this is what I am supposed to be doing: wandering around, taking pictures.
This day was one of those days: this is the 12th picture I’ve posted that I took on August 16. And there’s surely more to come. August 16 was a very, very good day.
Marfa, Texas
photographed 8.16.2013
Ice plant
Yesterday’s post might have caused some confusion between Vanishing Point* and a vanishing point, and I apologize for that. I really do.
But, here I am again, with a title that might have led readers in certain coastal regions to think I was referring to the ice plant**, when what I obviously meant was an ice plant.
I’ll try to be more clear in the future.
Marfa, Texas
photographed 8.16.2013
*Only $9.98 at Amazon. I bet that’s a good deal.
**Also known as pigface. FYI.
Vanishing point
Vanishing Point is a 1971 American action road movie starring Barry Newman, Cleavon Little and Dean Jagger. It has 3.5 stars here and 4 here. But that doesn’t have anything to do with this photos – just something Google found for me.
I like shooting wide-open spaces. But I also like the effects of shooting at close range in a narrow alley, which is what I did here, where the lines of the building, the door, the window, and the shadows from the power lines all converge somewhere down the alley – in a vanishing point, if you will.
Marfa, Texas
photographed 1.18.2013
Four windows
They started out the same, these four windows. The same size, and age, and all that. But look at them now, all weathering in a different way. I’ve mentioned before that I am not a fan of symmetry: it was asymmetry of this that caught my eye. I like it, and I like the way it seems to defy the original, symmetrical window installation.
Tahoka, Texas
photographed 10.6.2013
The dregs of dreams, 2
More dregs, more dreams.
The walls of this structure are slowly returning to the hard earth from which they came. Literally: the walls are made from adobe, an ancient building method that’s still in use. It’s sustainable – the ingredients are clay, sand, dirt, water, and some sort of organic material (straw, usually.) It doesn’t require any specialized tools. Adobe walls are load-bearing a,nd have good thermal properties. With the proper covering (plaster, or whitewash) adobe walls can last a long time.
Adobe won’t last once that outer covering is gone, and melts away.
In a desert that takes a while, but it still happens.
Terlingua, Texas
photographed 1.20.2013
