Westward Ho

Between Salina and  Delta I spotted an aesthetic old farmhouse.  The little relic was busting with character.  It’s likely from the middle of the nineteenth century since that’s when Brigham Young directed his Latter Day Saints to settle this broad valley in central Utah. From 1849 it was a dicey Indian fighting proposition for the Mormon pioneers until they mustered a robust militia in 1871 and finally rid Sevier County of marauding Utes, Paiutes, Navajos and Apaches.

Behind me in Salina were irrigated fields and broad avenues that spoke to the resourcefulness of the Mormons and to the prosperity that usually accompanied their diligence. Did you know it was the Mormons who brought irrigation to the desert southwest? It's a contribution that’s hard to overstate.

But now as I drew nearer to the Great Basin the country changed to arid scrubland that stretches to the Sierras and hosts America’s Loneliest Highway. That's my route, of course. Lonely and dry, it's how I roll. 

Mulligan Stew

When I got back to Taos and checked my blog I found that the images from Green River were mighty dark. They had looked fine on my laptop’s mediocre screen.  It goes to show that I need to match up the displays of I’m going to post from the road.

So I’m going to take a Mulligan for the first time.  It’s a blessing in disguise though since I gave poor Green River short shrift.   I was so beat Sunday night that I’m lucky I posted at all.

I stopped in Green River mostly because I didn’t know what the next town up the road would offer. By now I’ve learned that Salina about a hundred miles west would have done nicely.  I’m saving it for another jaunt.  Salina is a thriving little farming town of wide Mormon streets, trim irrigated fields and a bustling café called Mom’s.  Salina has Mom’s.  Green River has Ray’s Tavern. 

But this is about withering Green River and the treasure trove of decrepit that it is.  As I said Monday, Green River sits astride US 50 a hundred miles from anywhere and its best days, if ever there were best days, are long ago and far away.  In other words the perfect venue for me.  And as advertised, the town does boast Ray’s Café where I devoured a grilled 12 ounce pork chop, a baker, a chopped iceberg salad and frosty IPA.  Not bad for the fallback position to my fallback position.  Sometimes serendipity delivers if you go with the flow.  

Anything but Green River

The last thing I wanted to do was spend the night in Green River. Yet there it sat, a splash of ugly amid the splendors of southern Utah. They say in Nepal that you can drop your camera and still get a good shot.  Much the same can be said of Utah.  See above.

Green River is a withering uranium mining town on US 50 and home to some mighty fine melons and Ray's Tavern. I ferried a cantaloupe all the way to the Point Reyes seashore for an al fresco breakfast on Tomales Bay. It was a honey bomb. Melons and Ray's that's it. 

Their emergency medical equipment, however, is state of the art.

Under A Big Sky

Among my many series, the eclectic range of images that inhabit named categories, is Under A Big Sky, the category that is self-explanatory and which features the sky as the dominant subject that dwarfs what lies beneath.

Earlier this year President Obama signed into law a bill that named the Rio Grande Del Norte as the nation's newest national monument. The bill recognizes and protects a large swath of north central New Mexico that includes the canyon called the Rio Grande Gorge but also vast scrublands that begin just north of US Highway 64 and extend all the way to the Colorado border.  The flat chaparral is the Taos Plateau. It's little traveled and even less appreciated so here are images that celebrate the plateau's stark beauty.

That sky is why we're in Taos, folks.

Failed and Desperate, but enough about me

Good Luck

I was paging through my list of posts and was amazed to discover that I’ve been publishing this blog for seven years this week. Congratulations to me. The thing sputtered along for the first three years till I committed to a weekly post in the middle of 2009, a commitment, swelling of the chest, I haven't failed to honor since.

It turns out that the first post that I called Desert Denizen was of the photograph now known as Good Luck, one of the more successful, by what standard you may ask, images I’ve made.  I wouldn’t have remembered that it was first were it not for tenacious and painstaking research. 

Did I sense that the tragicomic little trailer would have such appeal?  Or, for that matter, did Good Luck prompt me to launch the blog in the first place?  Hell, I don’t know. The fog of time cloaks the obscure. 

Vanishing Point

To the surprise of exactly nobody Good Luck’s rival for best or most or least bad is Vanishing Point.  And apropos of my design musings two weeks ago these images seem to have transcended form and actually have something to say, no fault of mine I’m sure.

The remains of the meager habitation known as Keeler, California and the grim emptiness of the Pine Ridge Indian reservation, tell stories of places at the edge of hope. They spur me to discover more of failed and desperate America, a prospect that renders me giddy.

Punctum

Don’t ask me why but the hinge on this one really grabs me.  It’s the element that completes the picture and without which the image would be lacking. In fact, that’s a design concept worth studying, the idea that a single often small component can make such a difference in a painting or photograph.  That component has been described as the “punctum”, a point or detail that creates a connection with the viewer.  

See forever sky

A lot of people ask why we moved to Taos and most who do are folks who have made the same mistake, I mean choice.  Other than bad judgment, I tell them, we couldn't find a house we wanted to buy in Santa Fe. 

Then I recite a list of the real reasons that include better weather than northern New England, a bugless summer that lasts more than three days, skiing on actual snow, an honest to god art scene and that I, that’s the operative word, had a hankering to get back west.  Peggy not so much.

But first and foremost it’s the endless vistas, the see forever sky. There’s chest filling exhilaration as you stare in an oxygen deprived reverie across the chaparral with distant mountains heaving upward.  It’s akin to freedom in some abstract way. 

It 's no mean task to pick a couple of images that exemplify the eyes wide open desert.  I hope that these photographs taken just east of Antonito last week capture the feeling just a little.

Where you find it

It’s been said by many photographers that there’s a worthy image pretty much anywhere you happen to be. You just have to look or maybe the word is “see.”  So it was as we sat with our good friend Jamie Hindman at Cora’s Coffee Shoppe in Santa Monica.  Cora’s is a tiny mostly outdoor affair that’s attached to its pricey northern Italian sibling, Capo.  It’s misleading and unprepossessing moniker masks some serious culinary intent and a large, brunchish menu that’s uber Californian.  Wagyu “Kobe style burgers, rotisserie tacos de carnitas, steak, celery, arugula and parmesan salad, crimini polenta, rigatoni with white truffle oil meat sauce, artichoke tarragon omelet and Turkish breakfast with homemade simit ought to get you to the left coast pronto.  Cora’s and Capo proudly source their produce from Santa Monica’s extraordinary farmers market.  Goat’s cheese and wild sage honey anyone?

Both images today were shot in Cora’s leafy café and were taken from a sitting position with little more than a twist of the waist.  I’m all about economy of movement.  As a lapsed restaurateur, I think place settings make great though scarcely rare still lifes and the simple fountain on the wall behind me was a tasty bonus.  Both are everyday things that seen from the right perspective are artful and full of mood.  

Note to self, you have to have the camera with you to record this stuff.  As for simit, that's a Turkish bagel. 

By Design

A couple of nights ago my friend Elizabeth Daley, the powerhouse dean of the film school at USC, said that she had particularly liked last week’s photographs of the grain silos.  That was, in more or less her words, “because I like the ones that are designed.”   Now truth told every image I share has been designed or at least I think it has, which is to say consciously composed.  But there must be a difference in the ones that seem obviously designed and all the rest.  Equally true is that I don’t know for sure which ones pass the design test. 

It seems to me that the abstract work is more likely to be seen as designed.   But then, the corrugated bin landscape last week is representational, tells the whole story yet is “designed” in Elizabeth’s view.   Is that because silos are inherently aesthetic forms or that the composition works?  Or both?

Early on in my digital transition my images were entirely about composition and I worried that they lacked emotion.  Still do.  Even now, left to my own inclinations, I could easily design clever little vignettes in the viewfinder and call it a day.  Presumably though when design and evocative content  intersect you've produced a winner.  “Am I right or am I right?” as John Goodman's Walter Sobchak character asked in The Big Lebowski.

The ones I’m showing and telling today are ones that seem to be more about than form than anything else.  To show gamut I've included a still life, a landscape, an architectural, a nude and a sketch of winter.  There is no intended message or obvious emotional content in these so if it’s there I got lucky.

How many of you click on the email that you receive so that you go to the actual blog? Please do so when you’re moved to comment.  You'll see the images and copy in a more finished form and can click on the handy Comment link below each post to leave your pithy reaction to it.  It has been suggested that one of the reasons that there are relatively comments on the blog is that a lot of folks don’t actually get to the blog and can’t comment there.   I get about three times as many email comments as ones that get published and I’d sure like to see that ratio improve.

The earth is flat

The McCullough potato operation is an all natural enterprise and not just for altruistic reasons since quality has gotten better and better since going native.  Puh-leeze don’t use the term “organic” around Jim McCullough.  The word organic has been so misused, abused and downright lied about that it's nearly useless.  We'll go with natural.

Jim controls every step of his operation.  Unlike some farmers, Jim plants, fertilizes, harvests and warehouses his own potatoes.   His team literally invent and build equipment to do jobs that others farm out.  And every decision to keep these big jobs in house has paid off with improved quality and lower costs.  Jim claims he wasn't a school learning kind of guy but you could go to school on his business savvy and intuition.

The top three images have little to do with the potato story but the furrowed fourth is one of Jim McCullough's fields being planted. The abandoned farm house that is about to be leveled and the grain bins, those aesthetic corrugated cylinders, are not potato icons though they do speak to farming generally.  And, of course, since they're all platinum toned black and white they must be serious photographs.

The San Luis Valley has been described as pancake flat.  Uh huh.

The same only different

I intended to follow up with more of the potato story.  Oh but no. It’s funny how an unruly subject can interject itself at the most opportune time.  I must have needed a single image post. 

This one of my good friend Lindsey Enderby is from a couple of years ago.  I like it because it shows the bonhomie of this son of Gainesville, Texas.   Plus it reminds me of the iconic hat back and a lick of hair shot of Will Rogers, another cowpoke with a heaping measure of humor and kindness. 

Anyway, this one seems appropriate since Lindsey and his bride Nancy have just sold their cowboy emporium, Horse Feathers, and are now retired folks like some other people I know.  In truth this is a bittersweet moment since I along tens of thousands (I tend to inflate) of other strays first met Lindsey in the store and wound up as dinner guests at the Enderby homestead.

And where will I idle away my Saturday afternoons now?  

One Potato Two Potato

A few weeks back I was able to photograph the planting at Jim and Sue McCullough’s mega potato operation in southern Colorado’s San Luis Valley.  City mouse that I am I had no idea that when you plant potatoes you literally plant potatoes.  Sue, a regular painting partner of Peggy’s, had been dangling the chance to photograph the McCullough spread for it seems like a year and I have finally begun my introduction to the complex and oh so equipment intensive business of producing 1,400,000 hundred weight of potatoes.  So this is a major deal.  It is not a timid undertaking or one to be attempted without a full measure of cojones.  And speaking of cojones, Jim says, “You have to have potatoes available when buyers are buying even if some years you lose a little on every sale.”  You're a player or you're not.  So, the intrepid McCulloughs bank, that's the operative word,  on a high yields and high prices most years.  That means reinvesting, re-thinking and re-engineering the business constantly.  Jim aspires to produce and sell 2,000,000 hundred weight of Russets and has a plan in place, which is to say in his head, to do just that. 

This story that will require shooting the sprouting vines around the Fourth of July and the harvest in early fall.  Then there’s the warehousing, packing and distribution extravaganza that is a low light nightmare.  Get ready for a rush of motion blur.

This story has a lot going for it.  It’s new turf.  It’s learning about the dusk to dawn farming lifestyle.  And it’s in my beloved San Luis Valley with the McCulloughs as my hosts.  Big thanks to them. 

The sky opened and the earth shook

The sky has loomed large in painting and photography from the beginnings of each art form.  A dominant sky demonstrates power, scale and a mythic glimpse of the heavens like nothing else.

Big skies and empty deserts are natural collaborators.  They reflect each other’s vastness.   The Mohave among all deserts draws me and that attraction has been reflected here often.  Though all deserts share the attributes, if that word can apply to negatives, of an odd and meager human population, of abundant and desiccated icons of that habitation and a desperate austerity, the Mohave is more muy malo.  All deserts are inhospitable and forbidding but the Mohave is El Rey of badness. 

When we saw the monumental sky over the desert to our east we immediately got off the Interstate between Kingman and Needles, fingers crossed that we hadn’t missed the moment.  Getting the memorable shot, Ansel Adams and Henri Cartier-Bresson would testify, is often a matter of seconds and we had few to spare.   Adams, for example, claims he had a minute to take Moonrise Over Hernandez back in 1941 and that he didn’t even have time to meter.  Myth or fact, the tale illustrates a truth. 

You know that sky had to be special for me to stop.  I’m not, shall we say, much of a stopper.  That’s the burden of being an A personality I suppose.   But as a psychiatrist friend has often said, “We have therapies for this.”  And the therapy is stop for the damn shot. 

Has anybody noticed that the titles of my posts are often song lyrics?  And, if so, what’s the name of the tune from which this title came?

The time of firsts

Continuing the long look back we visit Salinas where I spent two or three early years at the end of the Second World War.  It was in Salinas that my first memories were etched including my first movie, my first best friend, my first crush and first food memory.  I remember that my first film was one starring Esther Williams, my first crush, and featuring a young Latin heartthrob, Ricardo Montalban.  It was either Montalban or the other handsome Latino actor of the forties, Fernando Lamas.  According to Ms. Williams’ filmography the movie must have been Fiesta which was released in 1947.  In an unlikely turn of events Montalban did the voice-overs on television commercials for a Mexican restaurant chain that I operated in the late seventies.  I didn't make that connection until this moment.  Esther Williams is 91 and lives with her third husband in Beverly Hills.  

Both downtown theaters still exist as live music venues and since I have no clue which one ran Fiesta here are both.

My best friend was Ramon Gutierrez who lived with his mother  Sally and his grandmother is a little court where my mother and I rented a bungalow.  Big Ramon was a prisoner of war in Japan who, because he was a gardener by trade and used in that capacity by his captors, came back home relatively whole since he could steal food.  Others were not so fortunate.

I have already told the story of my first food epiphany but it bears repeating since I was apparently born to eat.  On brisk winter afternoons after playing in the slough behind the house Ramon’s grandmother would make flour tortillas and roll them around melting butter. Nothing has ever tasted better or been more soul warming.  I’m convinced that my love affair with food sprung from that seminal experience with the lowly tortilla and I could probably weave my life’s story through the tastes that have punctuated it. 

Cowboy Tendencies

Old corrals evoke a sense of the west like few other things.  They're icons of a rough, tumble and self-reliant life on the American frontier.  In lots of ways that man against the elements sensibility still lingers in today’s western life.  And I do I believe that every boy wants to be a cowboy.  It's been true with me since my first pair of boots from Porter’s Western Store in the Santa Rita Hotel in downtown Tucson.  The year would have been 1951 if memory serves.  The smell of saddle leather ranks right up there with corrals, Wranglers and trophy buckles in stirring the cowpoke within.

Corrals like any subject can be photographed from infinite perspectives.  Sometimes, though rarely in my case since I'm such a purist, a little experimentation is in order. Here are a panorama and three other images all of which were made from two to five vertical photographs that have been stitched together.  The intent is to render more detail and acuity without the noise that can occur in very large prints made from smaller files.  My friend Terry Thompson is a master of the process and I claim no authorship of the technique.  

The corral in question resides just off Highway 285 near its junction with the road to Carson.  The ramshackle affair with its Sangre de Cristo backdrop speaks to the vast and epic place that is northern New Mexico.