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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
Memorial
Dangerous driving, illustrated by this roadside memorial.
For many years, I photographed roadside memorials (like this one) as part of an ongoing project,* but it had been almost a decade since I’d stopped at one. I don’t know why this one captured my attention enough to make two u-turns to get to it, but it did. And so it was that there, in the heat and the prickly weeds and serenaded by locusts, I examined the relics of a life that ended where I stood.
Ward County, Texas
photographed 7.12.2015
* I think “ongoing project” sounds a lot better than “unfinished project.”
One Day | One Image 