Blog Archives

Old School

I got my start in the photography world a while back, spending a decade photographing roadside memorials (usually crosses) along highways. I still watch for the memorials, but rarely stop to photograph them.

This one, though, needed to be photographed.

My photographer pal and I met up in New Mexico last month – we had less than 24 hours to shoot before he headed off to take a class at the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops, so we were busy. We were drawn the tiny town of Puerto de Luna, visiting it two times during our very brief adventure. On our one New Mexico morning, we were on a bridge over the Pecos River and saw this cross down below, just above the water. And it seemed to need us to look at it from a more intimate distance.

The top of the cross’s arm is engraved with “Old School” but we will never know why. Such is the mysterious way of roadside memorials – they are at one intensely personal and completely mysterious.

Puerto de Luna, New Mexico
photographed 3.25.2018

The View-Framers

The window frames in the melting adobe building help frame up the view, which is quite accommodating of them.

Puerto de Luna, New Mexico
photographed 3.24.2018

No plausible reason

At the end of a building that we decided had been the town school, an extremely random assortment of stuff bakes in the sun. At some point, presumably, there were reasons why that van and that clothesline and that bundle of wire coexisted. But that reason’s gone. Or at least not readily discernible to a pair of photographers.

Puerto de Luna, New Mexico
photographed 3.24.2018

It was a barbed-wire life


Every single thing in this scene points to a life that’s been lived on a hard and unforgiving edge.

Puerto de Luna, New Mexico
photographed 3.24.2018

Lot

For a place with nothing going on, this place had a lot of things happening. Also, those lights have been on all all the time at least since May 2013. In case you were wondering…

Santa Rosa, New Mexico
photographed 3.24.2018