Tag Archives: photographer

March 07, 2017 – The Railroad in Creel, Chihuahua

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March in Mexico continues with one of my favorite, albeit simple, photographs.

The bus stop and train station is the hub in Creel, Mexico. The El Chepe train line travels east-west across the whole country, delivering goods, people, and fresh seafood. The town square is a stone’s throw away, along with restaurants, curio shops, and privately owned markets. Tarahumara families, usually dressed in their brightly-colored traditional clothing, are always in the town square selling their hand-woven bear-grass baskets and hand-woven garments. As tourism has declined (Creel used to be a popular destination for American travelers), these families have much less to live off of than they used to. Tarahumara fathers, usually wearing regular ‘jeans and t-shirt’ street clothes, are known to walk along the main roads with their youngest and cutest children, pointing out who the children should approach to beg for pesos.

There’s an alpine feel to Creel, surrounded by pine forests and canyons. At dusk, a haze of smoke settles over the town from the wood-fired stoves that residents use for warmth and cooking. The entire town smells like burning pine-bark. Life here is simple, and the people are incredibly friendly. There’s a reason why I’ve gone back several times.

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March 04, 2017 – Urique Rancher, Mexico

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This is a portrait of a rancher who lives on a small piece of land on the outskirts of Urique.

He was in good spirits, but unfortunately we weren’t able to communicate very clearly. He was friendly and shook our hands, and spat out words faster than we could comprehend. My travel companion, who is infinitely more facile with the Spanish language, explained to me that this gentleman had a speech impediment, a stutter, which made talking to him incredibly difficult.

Nevertheless, this man was all smiles – revealing a few missing teeth – and offered us room-temperature lemonade. Several chickens strutted around the threshold to his shack, and papayas dangled over the makeshift fence around the property.

It was a cool little place.

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March 02, 2017 – Tarahumara Woman

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For a few years in a row, I traveled to the Copper Canyon region of Chihuahua in the springtime. Usually, the first destination was a small town called Creel, with an active community settled along the El Chepe railroad line, which carries seafood and other goods east-to-west across northern Mexico daily.

A contingent of the Tarahumara people, indigenous peoples of the region, live in this community. For the most part, only the women wear traditional Tarahumara clothing, but occasionally one might identify a Tarahumara man (Rarámuri) in bright pink, ornately patterned cloth.

This photograph was taken along the main thoroughfare through Creel, dotted with restaurants and gift shops and Tarahumara children begging for pesos.

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March 01, 2017 – Serial

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As we enter a new month, I’m considering the theme of ‘March in Mexico.’ I have countless images that have never been published from my springtime trips to the Copper Canyon (Barrancas del Cobre) Region the the state of Chihuahua. There’s a unique mix of indigenous tradition and Catholicism, an appreciation for tradition and an embrace of modernity, and there just isn’t any other place on earth quite like it.

To start things off, though? I present to you another semi-abstract image I was tinkering with. Aligned with other monochrome, macro, minimalist images, this is a photograph of a line of numbers hammered into a small piece of plate metal affixed to a wooden light pole. It certainly asks more questions than it answers. The area is roughly the size of a chewing gum wrapper, and it’s one of those easy-to-miss textures and details of daily life. I’m sure that the number refers to a manufacturing spec or is related to inventory or is somehow connected to the area that the product was routed to for installation, but your guess is as good as mine.

I enjoy the texture and contrast, and I don’t really mind the mystery.

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February 28, 2017 – Desert Rot

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One of the things that photography, and the volumes of underlying science, have taught me is that there is an aesthetic beauty implicit in the process of decay. When the veneer is stripped away, and as common objects are vulnerable, new textures surface. When we peel back the skin, we see new things – and we usually spend most of our waking lives trying not to see what’s beneath the surface.

Gray’s Anatomy. Diagrams of dissected bodies. Scars and scratches on once-pristine buildings, automobiles, billboards. We close our eyes in most cases, turn our heads, and ignore the viscera. I’m rather attracted to it.

Here’s my proof.

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February 25, 2017 – Tucson Rodeo

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Ryle Smith of Oakdale, CA, earned the second highest score, 9.3 seconds, in Friday’s steer wrestling event.

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I know. Two days in a row and almost the exact same picture. But there’s something about this particular event, steer wrestling, that totally captures my imagination. And hey, let’s not be coy, the event photographs really well. There’s urgency and heat and danger and friction. The rider, if he wants to take any money home from the competition, has a five-to-ten second window in which to achieve his goal. The hazer, his partner on horseback, has to try and guide the direction of the steer. If everything works out properly, including dismounting from a horse at a fifteen-mile-per-hour gait, the cowboy still has a three-hundred pound animal to contend with.

The air is electric when these cowboys ride. I know that there are complaints of animal abuse, that images of the event appear to project violence and cruelty. I could write volumes about the truth and the misconceptions about the sport, but that isn’t what today’s post is about.

Today’s post is a frozen frame, man and beast, and the lengths we go to in order to win a prize, put our best foot forward, dominate nature, survive an attack, get dirty.

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February 22, 2017 – Old Car

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Today’s image comes from Opera Drive, a winding road on one side of the canyon known to local Bisbee, Arizona residents as Brewery Gulch. There’s new money in the old mining town, and some old money – but mostly there’s no money. Anybody who walks far enough up Brewery Gulch will see the junk houses and the yards filled with splintered lumber, old tires, bathtubs, and rusted cars. The paved road terminates, giving way to a gravel pathway with sharp rocks and small remnant shacks from the old mining days, when Bisbee produced more copper than any other mine in the United States.

Up on Opera, looking down on the gulch, are houses perched on the hillside – some little more than remnant shacks, others renovated by the nouveau riche. Regardless of income or social standing, the views are just the same, and always fantastic. I made this picture of an old car parked on the roadside while I was hiking up to the end of the gulch, where the road splits into a couple of hiking trails that wind around into the surrounding hills in the high desert.

“The goal of abstract art is to communicate the intangible, that which eludes the photograph and normal seeing.”
~Curtis Verdun

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February 21, 2017 – Textures on the Trail

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My fondness for abstract photography is inexhaustible. This image was made in the open spaces of the San Rafael Valley, in Southeastern Arizona, in a small and underutilized ranch. This is a piece of farm equipment captured in my camera’s macro lens. There’s something about the texture of rust and chipped paint that I’ve found beautiful and fascinating, like a small little landscape the size of a human thumbnail.

“I understand abstract art as an attempt to feed imagination with a world built through the basic sensations.”
~Jean Helion

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February 20, 2017 – Analogue Landscapes of the Digital

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This is probably my favorite thing about photography – it’s a tool that lets the photographer share images with the world that would otherwise remain in the shadows, ignored, misunderstood, or unrecognized. This is a photograph of the metal casing and interior parts of a computer hard drive. The steel case has corroded from humidity, giving it an organic and interesting texture, and edits have been made to the color.

There is a whole world that exists in our bedrooms, in our pockets, inside our car doors. We never see what’s inside of our television, and we usually don’t question how the light-emitting diode actually functions, even though we’re obsessed with all of the flickering screens in this modern world competing for our attention.

This image is a meditation on that invisible world.

“Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph.”
— Matt Hardy

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February 19, 2017 – Painted Brick

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Midtown Tucson is slathered with foot traffic, dotted with some reasonably questionable neighborhoods, and absolutely covered in the shittiest graffiti you’ll ever see. There’s no real artistry to it, just a level of “this is the mark I’ll be making” level of hooliganism.

About a decade ago, when I last lived in the neighborhood, I remember there were several efforts for graffiti abatement; billboards and hotline numbers to report graffiti, paint donation programs through local hardware stores, and private homeowners who opted to foot the bill on their own. I used to walk the mile and a half to work at Jones Photo, Inc – it wasn’t uncommon to see a fresh coat of paint on an adobe wall on my walk home, only to see fresh spray-paint scribbles on my walk to work the next day. Folks quickly stopped even trying to match paint and they’d take whatever the hardware store was handing out, or they’d buy the cheapest primer; the walls and garage doors, businesses and restaurants, were slowly covered in sloppy bands of mismatched color, rolled despairingly over the tagged scribbles.

It’s frustrating, to be sure, but my photographer’s eye also found some interest in these textures. And it seems like the plague of artless graffiti has largely subsided – at least, compared to years ago. Most of what you’ll find today are grease-pen scribbles on light posts or at bus stops, or markings on defunct businesses, in back alleys, and on abandoned buildings like the one pictures above.

Naturally, if I have my camera with me, I’ll be taking pictures.
Until tomorrow, my friends, I hope you enjoyed today’s photograph.

“To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting an ordinary place… I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.”
— Elliott Erwitt

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