Compadres in Dayton Nevada...

June 10, 2015

We were leaving Silver City Nevada in late afternoon on our way back to Carson City when we happened to pass through a smallish town called Dayton that was important during the gold rush days of the 1890's.  After the Comstock gold rush faded, Dayton ceased to be important, slowly diminished to semi ghost town status, and then slept for about 100 years until it more recently woke up and and seems to have become an interesting place for people to live with a recent significant increase in population, a newish brew pub and has what turned out to be an amazing Mexican Restaurant called Compadres.   I probably wouldn't have remembered it or payed much attention to the town or our experiences there, which were like 100 other places, were it were not for the wonderfully renovated old house that is Compadres and the amazingly photogenic meal I had, but mostly it was the meal.  I say this because more likely than not, Mexican food, no matter how good it is, is hard for me to photograph.  It usually comes out as an amorphous red and/or greenish blob with some rice and shreds of lettuce on the side or somewhere that meld together into a frequently delicious, but unphotographical mess.  The people at Compadres worked magic, creating this plate of food surrounding my chile relleno that looked as good as it tasted!!!

Main Street in Dayton gives you some idea of the state of things.  If it wan't for the cars, you could easily imagine a couple of "bad hombres" walking' down the street looking' for trouble.  But those days are over and now,  it's funny how a really good meal can immortalize a place in your memory.  If I knew at the time that this meal would lead to a posting, I would have shot more.  Oh well...

                                                                         Pablo

One Hundred Motels...

For years while we have traveled the country I have always been on the lookout for US Post Offices in the small towns and back road villages of America and have collected quite a bunch.  Every now and then I still come across a good one, but it is getting harder  as the PO seems to reaching and increased degree of irrelevancy and no long seem to care about their image.  They are more of a  bland, nondescript cookie cutter standardized design, or sometimes just a double wide trailer with a USPS sticker on the front, often not even mentioning the name of the place.

While I still take the occasional USPS photo when I find a good one, these days my interest has shifted to motels.  They are also a dying breed, but they are still plentiful and unique if they have not been torn down or replaced by a flat stenciled plastic sheet on a pole.  On our Marfa  pilgrimage I took 5 pretty interesting photos of motel signs to add to the countless ones I have already taken.  As I sit here in our hotel room in Albuquerque where we will be for the next couple of days before we catch our flight back to Albany, I am already planning my next book...One Hundred Motels...Here are the five most recent ones...When I get back it will be time to search the archives for the other  95...This first one was not from the Marfa trip, but might just be good for the cover photo for the book.  This project might be a little less ambitious the Frank Zappa's 200 motels, but I'm no Frank, and in the end it might just be 50 motels...need to check the archives and stay on the road a bit longer.'

Outside of Durango Colorado

Vaughn New Mexico

Vaughn New Mexico

Marfa Texas

Van Horne Texas

Pablo

Marfa in the rain...

12/9/2018

Here we are in the barren, hardscrabble, unforgiving wasteland of west Texas, Marfa Texas to be exact.  The ultimate destination of our last trip of the year.  Flew into Albuquerque, have been traveling the green chile trail through Las Cruces, Mesilla, Hatch et al, eating as much green chile salsa as is humanly possible as we slowly made our way to Marfa.    Now that I've seen the Bonneville Salt Flats, most of Nebraska twice, and Monument Valley a lot, Marfa Texas was the only box to be checked off in my search for America.  Can't say why exactly, it's just one of those places that grabs hold of your imagination, and won't let go till you've been there.

Well here we are, and its raining!!!  It hardly ever rains down here and the people in town are thrilled.   I'm not, and as I sit here at the Paisano Hotel, looking at pictures of James Dean, Liz Taylor, and Rock Hudson et al who all stayed here in 1954 while shooting the movie Giant, I am pondering my next move since time is of the essence in that we are only here for 4 or 5 days.  By the way, we are staying in the Rock Hudson Suite, where he stayed during the filming and cavorting in ways unspoken at the time.

Well we are in Texas and the only thing to do is to take the bull by the horns, as they probably don't really say down here, and to get out there and shoot.  And shoot I did, and Marfa in the rain turned out to be more than OK.  When you are on the road, you learn to take what they give you and make the best of it because you are most likely not coming back.  I say this because we got a call today from our friend Mike in Albany that his girlfriend Milly, also our long term friend, who played the piano at our wedding, died yesterday of complications of a long illness.  The sadness is strong and part of our lives.  But we are here to work and this is a bit of Marfa in the rain that caught my eye.

They say "be careful what you wish for" and in the case of the mute soft colors of Marfa in the rain, it was what I didn't know I needed to feel the texture of the place until the next day when the clouds cleared, the sun shined harsh, and bleached the town to a hard flat white surface devoid of warmth and texture.  In fact the only thing of interest that the sun provided were a few unusually interesting shadows, something that I normally never see, but in this case found quite compelling.

Our casita at the El Paisano Hotel where you can still conjure up thoughts of Liz Taylor and the cast of Giant living it up here in the mid 50's...

and a few other random photos from around town...

The motel is gone, and the sign is slowly being reclaimed by the desert at the edge of town.  Still a bit of work to be done to flesh out these impressions of Marfa, but I wanted to get it in the books before we left town.  Marfa was the whole point of the trip and after 5 days and at least that many happy hours, I feel good about it.  Next stop, Roswell NM.

                                                                   Pablo

Addendum...

The Marfa Adobe wars...

As Marfa become more of a eurohip/arriviste/wanna be/place people think they want to live, though I can't imagine why, says a guy who spent 5 quite happy days there and was quite ready to leave when it was check out time...people are moving there seeking identity in the desert and seeking instant authenticity by buying adobe houses in any shape and then having the indigenous population do the hard work of fixing them up.  This has driven up the assessed price of adobe astronomically high, and along with it the property taxes have quadrupled or more leaving the old time Hispanic families and other old timers unable to pay the price of admission to continue to live where they have for generations and placing them in jeopardy (read about this on line) of losing their homes and has become an important political issue surrounding the plague of newcomers...

A lot of people wanting to be who they're not in a place they don't belong disrupting the natural order of things for reasons they don't even understand.  And then after a while they'll get bored, wonder why they did this, pack up their pre washed pre shredded jeans, cowboy boots, and the rest of their artsy faux western regalia and leave havoc in their wake.  Must admit, I sort of had that fantasy, but my great 5 days at the El Paisano Hotel, my daily happy hours at the St. George Hotel, and the boredom that set in walking the same empty streets with the few nice galleries and burrito stands was enough to put me off that mis-guided dream and just be thankful I got to Marfa and had my fill (in a good way)!!! 

                                                             Pablo 

Old Gravestones...Toward an improved typology through better photography...

Over the years, I have had an ambivalent attitude about cemetery photography.  I was drawn to the quiet somber solitude of old graveyards and the stories they tell, so often sad ones.  At one point I stopped taking pictures there, maybe because I was getting older and closer to the subject, but on a recent trip to Provincetown I stopped at the Old North Cemetery in Truro Mass., looking for a particular stone I remembered from years ago.  Didn't find it, but did happen to get a couple of great shots...

and I was hooked again, in fact I went so far as to begin a bit of on line research pertaining to the typology of stone carvings; winged heads, winged skulls, skulls and cross bones, trees, medusas, ... etc etc, and one thing that impressed me was the poor quality of the photos used as illustration...poorly lit, back lit, out of focus, badly shadowed, shot from above at a poor angle, too contrasty, etc etc, and it gave me the idea for a new project involving my contribution to improved illustration in the area of typology of early gravestone carving documentation , graphically anyway.  Till I came upon a certain stone in the Old North Cemetery, the sadness of which reminded me of why I stopped shooting stones altogether for many years.

I liked the image and shot the stone and only later did I actually read it and realize Mrs. Abigail Adams wife of Dr. Samuel Adams died in childbirth almost 250 years ago while her husband and family stood by helplessly as she suffered and their dreams died because there was so little they could do and for me, her stone was just some object of curiosity.  But then again, the stones are put up so people will be remembered and when was the last time anyone with any familiarity with Mrs. Adams stood in front of this stone to weep and remember.  I do think about her and am personally mindful of and thankful for the suffering we are no longer forced to endure.

I stopped the post mortums for a while after this photo.  Lately I have picked it up again here and there, and here are a few examples of my efforts which are posted mainly as an example of what a good gravestone photo should look like, especially if your interests are academic.  As I always like to say, and it seems particularly apt here, that "I don't think photography is an art, but rather the process of documenting reality artistically".

   Two of the winged skull variety at the Old North Cemetery...

And these last two are from the Old Burial Ground in Halifax Nova Scotia where they still celebrate the War of 1812, where many combatants are buried, as the reason they are not Americans!!!

And then there are these two winged chubby cheeked cherubs adorning two unrelated stones in the old South Hampton Cemetery on Long Island where we were this last weekend.  Obviously done by the same craftsman who had a unique style that makes you smile, although I'm not sure that was his intention.

So remember...get up close, wait for good lighting, focus well, get a good, sharp, even composition, level and well centered, and make sure the information you want to transmit is interesting as well as informative.  Then, take a minute or two to stop and read about the person whose stone you just photographed and think about them and who they might have been.  After all that is what the stone is for, to insure that you will be remembered.

                                                                           Pablo
                                                                           

                                       

Lost in the Lyrical Ballad Bookstore...

Hi...
It's been a while since I've posted.  Been doing a lot of shooting and printing and have gotten out of the habit of posting.  Also my world and overall level of enthusiasm about blogging about it seems to be contracting.  What has caught my interest lately is books, book stores and old libraries that still consider themselves to be an atheneum.  But today a few photos from the Lyrical Ballad Bookstore in Saratoga, NY.  a mystical labyrinth of loosely connected rooms full old, obscure volumes that remind me of the line from The Raven "Once upon a midnight dreary while I pondered weak and weary over many quaint and curio volume of forgotten lore".  When was the last time any of these books had been opened let alone read...

Spent a great day in the Providence Atheneum with photos to prove it.  Once I get the energy, I will add them.  In the meanwhile, there are a lot of photos still to be taken at the Lyrical Ballad.   Next time I need to bring a tripod. 

                                                                Pablo 

Positively 4th Street...

Huh!!!  What the hell am I doing in Cleveland?

Strong armed by Jackie in one of those marital standoffs that you find your self in and know you can't win, I came here, kicking and screaming all the way to a Flynn family gathering at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for three and a half days of rocking and drinking. Not to say that there are not some perks to being here, but my ass hurt after the 7 hour drive, and it took a few days and more than a few scotch on the rocks to appreciate my relatively good fortune in being here.

We are staying in the Arcade Hotel, a crystal palace built on 1890 above and around the most ornate, tastefully extravagant indoor shopping mall in an architectural style and elegance that is breathtaking and rivals anything that could have been imagined by Renaissance Europeans.

Across the street is 4th Street where Clevelanders go to drink and get wild.  We spent a lot of time there drinking and celebrating something.  Somewhere along 4th Street is an alley that leads into a dingy netherworld where unspeakable things happen after dark and one is advised to stay away.  From the street, it looks pretty benign, even inviting once we got by Maurice, the official greeter who took a buck to pose for this picture...

I was lured in by the pretty flowers, the bright twinkling lights and a glimpse of graffiti at what appeared to be the end of the alley, but was just the beginning of something evil.  I took this picture of the graffiti and way prepared to go further which I started to do when I was approached by two guys who looked like they had nothing to lose and could eat you alive.  I smiled, waved, and moved back carefully and quickly, no longer curious about what lay beyond.

Other than that, loved Cleveland a town that exceeded all expectations in terms of intact architecture and inner city vibrance.  It is the hometown of the two guys who created the Superman character and comic.  At the public library across the street from the hotel, they had an exhibit celebrating the Superman thing.

    Pablo                                                         

YES Books in Portland...

Here I am at the YES bookstore in Portland Maine troubling myself about buying a cheap stained and tattered first edition of  henry miller's book, an air conditioned nightmare, a travelogue about his amble across america in the 1940's after his return from europe which i have been meaning to read, but have been unable to track down off line until now.  surprised to find that it is nothing more than a 200 page rant, a spewing of venomous distain and unvarnished hatred about everything american, and i mean everything.  after 10 glorious years in europe screwing and sucking and writing his way across the continent, the inconvenience of WW2 forced his return to the object of distain he previously sought to escape.  guess the french resistance should have been more to his liking although i guess obviously not.

i often trouble myself about buying used stuff becauseyouneverknow when the object will be inhabited.  i am generally not a believer in the paranormal, but i have had some unsettling experiences with antiques, a certain "inhabited" hotel room in Epinal, France in which I awoke with a start to the feeling of an overpowering presence that drove me out in the middle of the night  and don't even get me started on "vintage" clothes.  "nightmare" is the kind of book i would have written if i could write (minus the venom), but i can't so i take pictures and am often capable of 20 or 30 lines of moderately pithy prose to annotate this pictures so i am thankful.  never had that problem with a used book, so i should probably go back in and buy it, which I did.  thought it would be a funny sexy romp through america in the 40's, but i got that wrong.

Coincidently, we were just in Portland Oregon a few months ago on the last leg of our quest to see all of the lower 48 states and other than Voodoo Donuts, going to  Powell's Bookstore (no pictures...too big and under renovation), had to be a highlight where I found the holy grail...my search for a 1940 edition of the book that has had the most influence on my career as a photographer had come to a happy end, "California and the American West" by Edward Weston and Charis Wilson, and published by Deuel Sloan was on the shelf with dust cover for $50 an unheard of price.  Interestingly, Jackie said she had the feeling I would find it there.

Two Portlands, two books, and two donut shops.  Voodoo in Oregon, and...here, which I failed to document because it was great but not visually compelling and I didn't know it would be this important.  Love Portland, so another great reason to return.

                                                                   Pablo