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life’s hard road
Like most photographers, I have certain scenes that I am attracted to, that are meaningful to me.
About 1997 I started photographing roadside crosses; it was an exceedingly odd thing for me to do, because I would never considered myself to be a photographer. But there was a voice in my head, a feeling in my soul that I *had* to do it. I tried to ignore it as long as I could but eventually that voice became too much to ignore. For a decade, I photographed these memorials, first using a point-and-shoot film camera, then moving on to a very basic digital camera; I almost never photographed anything except these sad memorials.
Then one day, I was done. With the project, and with photography.
Only of course I wasn’t: two years later I took up posting a daily image and here I still am, shooting and posting my way through.
And eleven days ago, I stopped at a roadside memorial. Some things just don’t relinquish their hold on you.
Bailey County, Texas
photographed 8.17.2025
snow/angel
I’ve photographed this roadside memorial before, but not with heavy snow falling on the crosses which commemorate the deaths of two people. I’m not used to snow or to photographing it (after all, I do live in Texas) but the symbolism of it – of life and death, of purification, of transformation – has not escaped my attention. And it did not escape my camera.
Lubbock, Texas
photographed 1.24.2023
cross/walk
I am not sure why all these crosses were lined up along the street on the outskirts of Española.
I’ve stopped at a lot of roadside crosses, and almost all the time they indicate a place where someone lost their life along the roadway. But this seemed different, somehow. For one thing, there were so many of them. And the death dates were different. Maybe over time, this has developed into the most dangerous roadway in the state. Or maybe over time, this has developed into an ad hoc location to put up a cross for a deceased loved one, if you can’t afford a traditional gravesite.
Española, New Mexico
photographed 9.1.2019
Josh, in the wind
I got my photographic start by making images of roadside crosses; I spent the better part of a decade stopping at almost every one that I saw. And then, one day, I was done. Just like that. (This is the last one I photographed from that time; the poem with it is almost a word-for-word account of what a woman who lived by the cross told me.)
Perhaps from habit, perhaps because the project’s not really finished yet, or from a combination of those two things, I still notice crosses and other memorials along the road. And sometimes, I do still pull over and make a few images. This one called to me, for reasons that I don’t understand. But of course I stopped. I had to.
Fluvana, Texas
photographed 10.20.2018
You can figure out the story
A crossroads, a pair of crosses. It’s pretty easy to see what happened.
Lubbock, Texas
photographed 6.2.2016
One Day | One Image 