Dunning, Nebraska

After leaving Broken Bow, we continued along Highway 2 for about 35 miles where we came upon the town of Dunning which was the last substantial place we encountered before turning north onto Highway 83 right before Thetford.   In retrospect, I am kind of regreting not seeing the route 2 thing to the end, but next time.  As far as I can remember,  the below street photos are taken on Jewett Ave. the once and present main street.  There are a little over 100 people living there.  What do they do and where do they shop why do the buildings look the way they do?   An old photo on the Dunning web site indicates that the space between the bank and the red building was once the Wilson Hotel.  Accompanying the photo is a pretty good history of the hotel by Larry Wilson, grandson of the man who built it and was involved in the establishment to the bank next door around 1918.  Interesting that Larry does not mention what happened to the hotel.  Maybe next time I am out that way I can ask.

As I said, Dunning was the last town we stopped at on highway 2 before turning onto highway 83 which cuts right down the middle of the sand hills to route 20 where there were a few towns we wanted to see, particularly Cody, which was kind of the centerpiece of the 1978 National Geographic article about the sand hills.  So, onto highway 83 and up to Valentine and Route 20.  When you only have 10 or 11 days in Nebraska, which might seem like a lot to some people (its not) and an hour or two in any given place, you hope the sun is shining, in the right place in the sky, that the photography gods are on your side, and that you can do the best with what the circumstances provide.

                                                                                             

Pablo

Ding dong the witch is dead....

May 2, 2011

On schedule, we left Omaha on Sunday, May 1 and arrived in Lincoln a few hours later.  We were still in Lincoln on May 2 when the news broke that Osama bin Laden had been killed.  I'm not sure if I really cared or if I had any strong feelings about it one way or the other,  but just the same,  it happened.  They say that people always remember where they were when they first knew of important events.  In November of 1963, I was in the gym locker room, changing out of my gym clothes when some guy came in and said "Did you hear, JFK has been shot".  I can still see it in my minds eye as if it was yesterday.  Was sitting in a bar in Brussels watching the moon landing in 1969 with the rest of the world and feeling kind of smug.   For the World Trade Center disaster on 9/11/01, I was just beginning a group therapy session in the crisis unit of a state mental hospital I was working at, when my phone rang.  It was Jackie calling to tell me to turn on the TV,  because a plane had crashed into one of the buildings.  As I and many of the patients sat mesmorized by the image, the second plane hit the second building, and we all realized at that point that something more was going on.  When Barak Obama was elected president, we were watching the election results somewhere in Baja, Mexico.  I think we were in some little bar in La Paz.  Things get a little foggy as to the facts due to our alcohol consumption, and brains being fried by the heat.  One thing I do remember, is that there were alot of Americans in the bar that night and that all of them did not share the excitement many of us did over this momentous event.  I had an unsettling feeling over the negative energy going down there that night and remembered that scene in Rick's cafe in Casablanca where the German and French partisans and soldiers came close to battle singing their respective anthems.  We had no Rick to keep the peace, but thankfully, all ended quietly for us Americans that night in La Paz.

I'm not sure the killing of bin Laden was all that memorable for me,  in fact it was somewhat anti-climatic, occurring so many years after fact that it had lost its impact,  so I took these pictures so that I would remember who I was and where I was when this happened.

A few days after the fact, we were spending the night in Broken Bow where I saw this patriotic tribute to those involved in the killing.  I think many Midwesterners may take there matters more personally than we do back east, or maybe at least, those of us from NYC.

Addendum:
On August 6, 2011 a Chinnook helicopter carrying 20 + navy seals in addition too 11 other servicemen was shot down in Afganistan by a surface to air grenade.  A lucky shot some military commentator said. All 31 aboard were killed.  It was kind of ironic that these highly trained killing machines met their end in a tin can in the sky without firing a shot and without a chance in hell.  Kind of like those 30+  middle aged tourists who died in the bus crash on the way to Atlantic City because their driver fell asleep at the wheel.  You never know what will be but at least they were out there living on the edge and living their dream (the navy seals, that is).  Which makes this sign doubly meaningful.
                      
                                                                            Pablo

Seeing...

 In his book The Phenomenon of Man, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said "the history of the living world can be summarized as the elaboration of ever more perfect eyes within a cosmos in which there is something more to be seen".

Seeing is evolutionary.  It does not come all at once and sometimes it comes too late, but mostly it is the cumulative result of ongoing experience that will hopefully be woven into the fabric of an organizing principle the gives form, order and ultimately meaning to the visual field.  This was never more true for me than on my first trip through the southwest where I grappled hopelessly with the vast expanse of space and emptiness that was beautiful and hypnotic, but photographically uncomprehendible.  It was only when I came home and found, in the midst of many useless contact sheets, one sheet that had three photos in a row that I did not remember taking but surprised me with myself and my unswerving sense the symmetrical  a theme that has shown up throughout my work and asserted itself to impose the template necessary to organize my experiences in a meaningful manner,  and they are as follows:

I loved Arizona , New Mexico and Nevada, and these three photographs were motivation to return to the southwest on a number of occasions and resulted in a show entitled "Signs of Life in Death Valley and the American Southwest".  It was the human residue that provided the lynch pin that pulled it all together.  Here are a sampling of latter photos from the show inspired by the above.

I have come to realize that this has been true of me on my photographic journeys which I often begin with no sense of where I am or what I am looking at.  Sometimes I never see anything of what there was to see and sometimes the vision evolves so slowly that I am well along the way before it dawns on me what there was to see.   Unfortunately, by the time you you are able to see, you may have already missed alot, but what can you do?  If you are lucky and able, you can return mentally organized and ready to capture the vision.  I did in the southwest as the following pictures show, and now I am hoping to return to Nebraska, where this blog was supposed to begin, with a greater sense of what I want to do.

                                                                    Pablo

Nebraska?

May 15, 2011

It's funny how good things sometimes just fall from the sky. Jackie had been wanting to go to the annual Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting in Omaha at the end of April, and as it turned out, her cousin's son was graduating from high school in Auburn, Nebraska two and a half weeks later, so we found ourselves roaming the back roads of Nebraska with pit stops at Mt. Rushmore, S.D. and Cheyenne, Wyoming, thus seeing more of the state than most Nebraskans or for that matter most other Americans ever do.  It was otherworldly, at least to someone from New York.  A treeless, flat rolling sea of grass punctuated by literally millions of miles of barbed wire and small ghost towns every twenty miles or so.  Small main streets off the highways,  mostly abandoned buildings with a name, a post office, a bank, maybe, and sometimes a church or general store, or maybe none of the above, just the remnants of what was, once upon a time in middle America, the center of rural life during those moments off the farm and away from the monotony of the fields.  Now they are just the sad, evocative suggestion of what once was.  You could stand there in the silence of a warm spring breeze, and imagine the America as it once was.  Simple, unadorned, and utilitarian, but full of a life that made the isolation of farm life in this unforgiving place possible.

When I think of ghost towns, I used to think of the broken down mining towns of the southwest, now mostly just piles of rock, tumbled walls that barely suggest what once was.  But the back roads of Nebraska, that's where you'll find the motherlode of abandoned and surprisingly intact remains of nineteenth century America.  You don't have to look too hard, just head for the sand hills.

The interstate highway system is a wonderful thing.  It allows you to travel all around the United States and never see America.  Avoid it when you can and you will be rewarded.  Hope my pictures tell at least a small part of the story.  But I need to get back, now that I think I know what I am looking for.

For better or worse, although probably a bit of both, this blog entry marks the beginning of a new phase in my career as a photographer.  Till now I shot mostly b&w film and the occasional roll of color in a medium format camera.  I swore that I would stop shooting when they stopped making film.  But I fell in love with digital, occasionally borrowing my wife's point and shoot.  Went out and bought an Olympus EP1 and haven't looked back.  But what to do with all the photos, though.  Some of my techno savvy younger relatives suggested a web page, some said a blog.  One niece said dismissively "nobody blogs anymore".   "What do they do" I asked.  "I don't know"she said, "they text I guess".   Well I found blog spot, and this marks my very first blog.
Addendum:
 (I have looked back at it now and then and have been tempted to tamper with it, but decided that it is what it is and will the the standard by which to measure future output).

                                                                    

                                                                       Pablo