Monday Monday

Ferrous Abstraction precedes my blog by two years. It was taken in Rinconada, New Mexico in 2004. I like the simplicity of the image. 

This is a Monday like no other in the annals of Immelphoto.com. Today I’m announcing my move from blogger.com to Substack. The change has been in the works for weeks as I overthought the benefits and risks of doing it. It's prompted in part by the quirks of blogger.com that have grown greater and more frustrating with every passing week. You’ve noticed and have said as much.

Beyond the mechanical limitations of blogger.com is my goal of reaching a larger audience. Substack seems to have that capacity. Its contributors are wide-ranging and many are well known. There's a community of creators within the platform. That's an audience unto itself. I will be part of that growing community. One of them, my longtime friend Jeff Curto, switched to Substack after 20 years of podcasting and a long career as a photographer, writer and educator. He was looking for engagement. My eyes are wide open to the rabbit hole of engagement. It could become the world’s greatest time suck. Yet here I am diving into the deep end.

Please read Jeff Curto-At Home on Substack He’s a marvelous photographer who finds beauty at every turn. His words are heartfelt. His images are poetic.

Today you're receiving this final post on blogger.com and my first article on Substack. Please endure the redundancy. Once I know that your subscription to immelphoto.com has been transferred to Substack and you're receiving my stories Substack will be my platform. I will continue in the style and spirit of 19 years and 1,009 posts on blogger.

I will retain immelphoto.com in order to preserve all 5,000 pages of content and as a fallback in the event Substack doesn’t perform as expected.

Thanks for reading my posts all these years. I couldn’t appreciate it more. I hope the change makes me to up my game, to take my imagery and storytelling to another level. I feel the pressure to do exactly that.

Abandoned

Good Luck, Keeler, California.

A couple of weeks ago I got an email from my photographer friend Terry Thompson. He’d seen a call for entry for a show called Abandoned. He knew that theme was right up my dark alley. I’ve been captivated by places where man’s footprint is evident, but little remains. Those scruffy locales have grabbed me at least since 2002, probably longer. In fact, abandoned places and things have earned their own category in the annals of Steve Immel photography. The category At the Edge of What’s Left hints at stories about man’s failed attempts to tame the untamable, where the futility is palpable.

Standard Oil of Cow Springs, Arizona.

Presbyterian Church, Taiban, New Mexico.

The image that launched the series was made in the near almost ghost town of Keeler, California. The year was 2006. The image is Good Luck. To amplify on the abandoned theme, the teardrop trailer on the shore of an alkaline lakebed has returned to the  earth. It’s no longer an identifiable trailer. It’s pile of rubble. I know this because I Googled Keeler and saw a photograph of the metal detritus where once had lived a perky trailer amid the ruins of a mining town relegated to what ifs.

Jackrabbit Homestead, Morongo Basin, California.

Standard Oil of Rice, California.

Here are a handful of photographs from At the Edge of What’s Left newly shortened to The Edge of What’s Left. Less is more, cupcake.

I fully intended to enter Abandoned till I saw that the Tucson gallery hosting the show would print the photographs on luster paper, would be displaying small prints in cheap mats and frames, I’d have no control over pricing, and they’d have my files. Uh, no.