Personal film photography podcast about traveling, shooting film, a bit of history, and whatever random things come up. Hosted by the former co-host of All Through a Lens.
I grew up in a rural town in central Pennsylvania surrounded by rolling hills we called mountains and creeks we called “cricks.” It was often lush and green through summer. The earth was dark clay, and when the farmers would run their plows through it, the discs would produce lines of packed soil. It was typically east coast - every small town had a main street, a school and dueling pizza and hoagie shops.
While the spring brought flowers, and the autumn an array of color, the winters were bitter, and in summer the skies were white with a humidity so thick that even on a 70 degree morning, your shirt was soaked with sweat from just walking outside.
But this was my home, and I knew little more. My parents took us on vacations each year, but most of those were relatively local — the shore, the nearby state park, New England, and once we went to Florida.
The plan was always to go west. Not just in my life, but in the lives of generations before me. Even the earliest of white European settlers longed to move west from the shores of Jamestown and Plymouth. The overflowing cities gave way to a small colonialist migration on the Wilderness Road to Kentucky. The fur trade pulled mountain trappers like Jim Bridger deeper into the West. The Gold Rush and Homestead Act drew even more from one coast to the other, pushing aside or slaughtering anything and anyone in their path. And all through our teenage years, fueled by Springsteen songs and movies, we too longed for California.
But even California seemed like a reflection of the east coast to me. Every TV show and movie purported to take place in the east was filmed in California. Shoot around the palm trees and maybe toss in some fake snow and you’ve got Anytown, Pennsylvania.
The draw to get out, get on the road, and head to California was ingrained. Our parents fought against it, but we knew. We, in all of our teenage angst and certainty, knew there was nothing here for us, knew that we had to escape, we knew this town rips the bones from your back, it's a death trap, it's a suicide rap. And we had to get out while we're young.
But I didn’t get out while I was young. Instead, after high school and a smidge of college, I moved to Ohio and West Virginia and back to Pennsylvania, defeated. I even got a job in the same factory my father worked in. I would continue living this Springsteen nightmare for years until I finally woke up, got in a car, and headed West myself.
Until that trip, the farthest west I had traveled was Illinois. It was flatter, but otherwise much the same as Pennsylvania. And so, one summer, I got a few weeks off of work, loaded up and headed for California.
On this first true journey away from home, I drove along the Blue Ridge Mountains, cut across Mississippi, rolled through Louisiana and Arkansas, and into Texas and Oklahoma. I was fascinated watching the land slowly change. The birch trees turning to alder turning to magnolia; the hills to mountains to wide river plains and bottoms; the skies from barren humid white to fog to the bluest of skies.
In Oklahoma City, I took Route 66 into New Mexico and Arizona. I had never seen a desert before. Not even in movies, not like this. Stopping, I saw nothing that looked like anything familiar. The earth beneath my feet was sandy and red or white. Gone were the mountain laurels swaying by a cool stream. They were replaced with gnarled and sharp creosote clinging to a dry wash. There was no breeze. But the sky! The New Mexico sky there existed a deeper blue than I had ever before imagined.
The landforms themselves were alien, almost cartoonish. The rocks, the animals, the insects, everything in existence before me was utterly and conclusively different from everything in my existence up to this point. I was taken in by this contrast and it held me for days.
I had to continue on to California, and as I moved through the Mojave into Los Angeles, the familiar began to slide its way back in - in a real sense, a city is a city. Up the coast to the Bay Area, things were different and the trees were bigger, but they were still trees. The Pacific Ocean was still an ocean. The rivers were rivers, just like back home.
On the drive back east, I took the interstate through Kansas, only noting how boring that state must be, not realizing that the interstate system allows us to travel across the entire continent of North America and see exactly nothing. A few years later, I took another such trip. Again in awe of New Mexico, and again another long eye-roll drive home, this time through Nebraska.
Then, through an odd series of events and reasons, I moved to Seattle, taking a couple of weeks to see the west again and along the way.
I had visited Seattle before, and found the land relatively and broadly the same as back home. Not exactly, but apart from the jagged peaks and volcanoes on the horizon, everything was comfortably similar.
The trip west — the final trip west, the trip that was the culmination of years of crying out the words to “Thunder Road” — found me off the interstate and in Nebraska. This wasn’t the land of the east, and yet, there was a hint of the familiar. But it also wasn’t the desert west. There were a few cacti and maybe some sage here and there, but this was some place set aside, a place almost forgotten.
I thought back to my interstate drives through the Plains, wondering if I had missed something there, too. I had to keep moving, but that pull west was less upon me. And when I moved to Seattle, that same pull drew me back east to Kansas and Nebraska.
If you were wondering how long it would take me to talk about photography, well, that time is now. Though, I’d argue that I’ve been talking about photography this whole time. Because all this time, I was shooting digital in a way that skirted and bordered upon the serious. I had some sort of small point and shoot and had gotten more interested in composing shots rather than just flicking away.
Over the next few years, this turned back into film. I shot film as a kid because there was no other choice. I learned how to use an SLR (a Pentax K1000) from a very early age, but it was just any other camera to me. It was nothing special and neither was I.
The first years in Seattle had me exploring the immediate area as well as taking some trips into Idaho and Utah. I fell in love with the eastern part of the state as you might already know. But that pull to Kansas and Nebraska was strong.
I picked up a film camera again around this time. I shot color at first, quickly learning how to develop it myself - even then, I couldn’t afford to both pay for film and its processing. I folded in black & white within a year or so.
Starting maybe eight years ago, I began to take a month off in the summer to travel. It would mean some pretty crazy sacrifices to make this happen — both financially and career-based — but I figured it was worth it.
My first such trip was to the middle, to Kansas and Nebraska. I wouldn’t take a straight shot there and back, but a slow ramble, and then eventually two and a half weeks zig-zagging across Kansas. It was one of the best months of my life, and in a way, I’ve been trying to recapture that every year since.
I entered the northwest corner of Nebraska on dirt roads. My memory is faulty here, but in Wyoming, I drove past a herd of cows bathing in a pond, then an abandoned school, which I photographed extensively. I recall the road deteriorating to a two track around Three Tubs Mountain and hoping my car could deal with the sandy surface and sharp turns. I’m not sure how much of that was actually real. When it comes to the road, things tend to run together.
Nebraska, for me, was a grassland near the tri-corners it shared with Wyoming and South Dakota. I stopped by an abandoned Catholic Church on a battlefield of the Sioux War, along Warbonnet Creek. They placed a monument on a hill a half-mile or so from the road. With the stark and cloudless sky above me, I hiked my way with my cameras to the monument.
As I crested the hill, the wind picked up, blowing grasses like waves over the ocean with no shore to crash upon. These rolling hills were devoid of trees, of even larger plants. Here, it was the familiarity of grass mixed with the desert’s cacti. But this was no desert, just as this was not home. There was a perfect blending of the two. Something ultimately unfamiliar holding ground with something so common as grass.
I hefted my 4x5 out of my pack and did my best to steady the camera on its tripod in the wind. I was shooting an Intrepid at the time, and some fairly normal lenses. This was my first trip with large format, and really only my second or third day using it. My photos bear this out.
A blank and cloudless sky is nearly an anathema to me now, but then, I’m not sure I noticed. But I did want to capture the ground - both its softness and its brittle ruggedness. I shot low, battling thorns and rocks hidden between the soft bunches of grass. I watched out for snakes.
And I stood there, face to the wind, claiming this small hill as my own in the fading afternoon. No car passed by the road a half-mile away. No other person could see me over the rolling expanse of prairie. I understood that this was momentous; this was a sensation I would be chasing for the rest of my life.
The prairie is uncanny, taking grasses and flowers and wind and some trees here and there, all familiar, but replacing the near horizons with an endless sky. Here, there were no clouds, and the land seemed humbled beneath the broad and empty blue.
Over the next half dozen years, I would return to this spot six times. Each visit wears itself like a metaphor for the prairie: familiar, but always different, always changing.
The next day, I traced for myself a thin line into Kansas, entering near the preposterous Arikaree Breaks — canyons eroded by a thousand spring floods — as if to reassure me that the Kansas I was about to enter was not the same one ignored by the blind interstate traveler.
The only way to see Kansas is to spend time with it. Passing through is hardly an option. I spent the next two weeks crossing the state west to east then east to west and both back again. I was captured, more lead along than traveling.
There’s little reason to present a day-by-day, town-by-town examination of my trip. I kept mostly to dirt roads, hundreds of miles upon them. The towns I visited were small and empty, some with thriving downtowns, some with empty storefront shells. I walked the same paths as John Brown, visited the cemeteries of those who gave their lives in a fight against slavery. I saw small cities flattened by tornadoes and rebuilding. I slept in parks, where the conservative towns offered the socialism of free camping.
Kansas has the most beautiful sunsets, the deepest reds and purples across their unparalleled evening skies. And the storms, with lightning and torrents, found me huddled and frightened in my small tent.
One night, after one such unforgiving storm, a crescent moon appeared with a single bright star nearby. The following morning, when I was in a garage having my tire patched, a farmer came in to see if everyone made it through to dawn.
“Did you see the moon last night?” he asked. “It was a little sliver of a thing, and cradled Venus just like...” And he cupped his hand while his gentle eyes placed the star nearly within it. Here was a poet, I thought. And Kansas became almost perfect to me.
Like with the winds against the hill on Warbonnet, I knew that I would be chasing this forever. And over the years, I’ve caught it again and again. These moments are fleeting, but not rare, not if you know where to look. And it’s these moments that hold the reason for my wandering.
I’m not here to sell you on Nebraska and Kansas. The prairie is deceptive and not for everyone. But I am here to urge you to find such a place for yourself. A place that holds some small reminiscences of home — that familiarity is welcome. But also it should have a larger and more complicated demeanor, something strange and like nothing back home. A place you can’t lay claim to, but that lays claim to you.
This doesn’t really require a lot of travel. I realize that my poor career decisions have also allowed me to experience the road more than most, and that not everyone has this burden-turned-luxury (bound to turn burden again at some point). But it does require a bit of exploration. This could mean exploring the entire continent (or one of the other continents, I suppose, but sticking to the one you’re on seems more convenient). Or it could simply mean exploring a part of your own county or state that you’ve not visited much before.
When I lived at home and worked in that factory, I’d take weekends to drive the backroads of the county I grew up in, the same county I still lived in. There were streams and forests I had never seen, roads I had never driven, and a thousand photos I would not have otherwise taken. The differences were more subtle, but they were there and worth seeing.
This place might not speak to you at first, almost like it’s choosing silence and assessing you as well. But when you leave to return to your normal life, does it call for you? Does it try to pull you back? Are you thinking of it now?
And what happens when you return? How do you capture this on film? This is something more than just finding an interesting location, it’s finding a new home. Not one where you could live, necessarily, but one you never leave, even when you can’t stay.
I keep saying “these places” because we don’t have a word for this concept. We don’t have a word for a place we love that feels sort of like home, but isn’t home. We have the expression “home away from home,” but it’s cute and quaint and, to me, doesn’t touch this idea. We have “third place” — the place you spend the most time in besides home and work — but that is more about time than love. We need a word and no word exists.
Still, having these places in our lives is important. They don’t just give us good stories and memories, but they give us something to look forward to, a sort of extension of home where, even on the shittiest Thursday at work, we can dream and plan about getting away.
They are also good for our photography. I have a very difficult time photographing where I live, though I think most people don’t. However, you’ve probably already photographed the hell out of your town.
But if we give ourselves the opportunity to range and explore and photograph as much as we can, we are bound to find something. And since we might only return every once in a while, it’s nearly impossible to over-photograph it.
If we’re observant, we might notice some of the larger changes happening around our homes. We notice the seasons, of course, but there are subtle changes, slow changes, that we hardly see at all.
But with each visit to these frontiers we’re exploring, it’s much easier to see how they’ve changed over the months or even years. And since we’re photographers we document these changes, comparing photos from time to time.
Most importantly, we sometimes just need to get away. Becoming house-bound isolationists does us no good. Being perpetually online is stifling, and finding a sort of peace away from our normal day-to-day lives is as rewarding as it is essential.
You don’t have to travel hundreds or thousands of miles to make this happen. But you should do what you can to find this. If you already have it, foster it, expand it, make sure you don’t take it for granted. You have found something special, love it all you can. And, of course, photograph it all you like.
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Why We Embrace the Imperfections of Film Photography
Monday, February 3, 2025 • Duration 21:48
I’ve got three things to talk to you about today. First up is about a major minor setback I had last week. It’s first because it’s a first-world problem, but since it’s my first-world problem, it’s going to be yours as well.
Second, you’re going to learn something about photography. Not the thing. The word.
Third, we all hate social media and now we’re playing musical chairs. The last one on Instagram please turn off the light.
I haven’t been writing as much as I used to. There was a time when I could sit down and scratch out a few thousand words every day. First, it was embarrassing poetry, then regular poetry, then personal and travel blogging, and then I became a history blogger. Then, I got more interested and serious about film photography, and in a way that filled much of the void otherwise filled by writing.
And while photography is wonderful, there’s some itch left unscratched that only writing can get at.
When I did the previous podcast, All Through a Lens, I filled my days once again with writing and research. A 90-minute episode would take days to write. That schedule became a full-time job and once we were okay with pretending that Covid was more or less over-ish, I went back to work, and it became unsustainable.
So now, still with that full-time job, I’m at it again. But this time will be different, I tell myself. This time I’ll stick to mostly opinion and personal topics. They might be more challenging to write, but there’s no research and that was the true time-suck of it all.
This brings me back to film photography. With many of the photos I share on social media, I include a bit of writing. Sometimes it’s something I jot down with but a few glances at the photo. With the cemetery stuff, I do actual surface-level research and write about what I find. But lately, I’ve been rattling ideas around in my head, playing with them throughout the day, and penciling down not nearly enough notes.
Not long ago, I spent the day mulling over a sentence: We embrace the imperfections of film photography as if what we’re photographing is perfect. I knew it wasn’t exactly what I wanted to say or how I wanted to say it, but it was something.
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Hello.
Thursday, January 23, 2025 • Duration 22:45
Hi there. I’m Eric. I’m a photographer. If you don’t know much about me, I suppose here is as good a place as any to get to know me.
I live in Seattle, but almost never photograph anything here. My preference is the eastern part of the state, and I’m out there in the spring and autumn as much as I can be - mostly weekends. I also have messed up my life enough to get a month off every year for more extended travel, a four-week photography trip that is equal parts exhausting and productive. It is not a vacation in the sense that there is nothing relaxing about it. More on this later.
My work is generally black & white and shot on film. I prefer medium and large formats. None of my cameras are lightweight, and this has somehow not stopped me from hiking with them. This practice is inadvisable and not sustainable. Each year I tell myself I’ll figure out a better way and never do.
Often, I take winters off from photographing. This allows me to enjoy a kind of hibernation and to sort out what I’m doing in the coming shooting season, which generally starts in March-ish.
Each winter, I lay out my coming trips and my plans for the next few months. And I think I’ll share a bit of that here. I don’t know if it’s interesting, but we’ll see.
Last Summer Was Bad
I’ve had an amazing string of luck on my summer trips. No accidents, no injuries, nothing stolen, I wasn’t shot at, everything was basically fine.
Last summer this streak ended. Though not dramatically. Sort of.
I left Seattle with the idea of getting to my parents’ house in Pennsylvania in three days. I’ve done 1000+ mile days before and figured that doing three in a row would be a great idea.
This was a mistake. The first day was indeed fine. The second was okay. I was tired, but knew I’d be “home” tomorrow. On the morning of the third day, somewhere in Indiana, I became intensely nauseated.
I was on the Indiana Turnpike and pulled over at a rest area to sort it out. By “intense,” I mean that I was green and felt like I was going to barf. I couldn’t move without waves of nausea spinning me around. I tried to walk it off, I tried to sleep, I tried to ignore it. I knew that the longer I spent there, the longer it would take to get off the road.
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Nearly Dying Alone in a Utah Canyon
Thursday, March 6, 2025 • Duration 33:49
Hello and welcome! I’ve got a story for you. It’s about the time I dragged way too many cameras into a Utah Canyon. Did I get any photos? Did I see cool stuff? Did I ever return? Find out!
This is a longer one, so strap on your backpacks, grab your cameras, and make sure you have enough water. We’re going in.
I stood overlooking the canyon two hundred feet below me, deepening, falling and twisting west into the late July sunset. Returning to my tent, pitched under the relative shade of a cluster of juniper trees, I checked my pack. I was nervous and alone.
Solitude had marked every turn of this trip and now, after nearly a month on the road, I was worn. This was my final stop and in a few days I would be home. But first, I needed to explore the canyon below me.
I don’t remember when or how I first heard of Bullet Canyon, a tributary to Utah’s Grand Gulch in Bears Ears National Monument, but seeing photos of Ancestral Puebloan cliff houses and kivas, nearly untouched, I had to experience these myself.
In the spring and autumn, this is a popular trail seeing a couple groups a week. By July, with temperatures often over 100F in the depths of the canyon, there’s nobody. In March and April, there are several springs and even a stream at the bottom of Bullet Canyon. By July, they’ve been dried up for months. Any water you need has to be carried in.
This was far from my first ten mile desert hike. I fully understood the need for carrying more water than you think you’ll need. The heat itself, not to mention the physical act of walking ten miles, would dehydrate me. I knew the symptoms of heat exhaustion and the dangers of succumbing to it alone. I’ve learned how to hike in these places from experience. This wouldn’t even be my first summer Utah canyon hike. It was, however, my longest.
I emptied my pack to make sure I had everything I wished to bring into the canyon. I had a 4x5 camera (I was shooting an Intrepid then), wrapped in a dark cloth with a 150mm lens, six film holders (so, twelve shots) and a small tripod. I also brought two 35mm cameras: a Ricoh and a Soviet-era Smena 8M. For overkill, I also carried a plastic 1960s Imperial Savoy and the metal Ansco Color Clipper. Five cameras just in case.
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Why Do You Want to Be a Photographer?
Monday, February 24, 2025 • Duration 20:53
I have not picked up a camera yet this year. My last photo was taken in a cemetery on New Year's Eve. I don’t miss it, and I don’t worry that I may never pick one up again. I’m fairly certain I will, I’m a photographer, after all. What I also don’t worry about is inspiration.
The way I shoot is much like a travel photographer on assignment. I rarely touch a camera if I’m not on the road (at least a daytrip), and I’ve never worried that I won’t be inspired to photograph once I leave town. It’s just not something that crosses my mind anymore.
But it’s late winter, and a lot of photographers start getting a little worried that they’ll never photograph again, that nothing will motivate them to look through the viewfinder, that nothing will inspire them. And that must be a little terrifying.
I know it is. I used to live with that fear, especially in winter.
For many of us, we spend the spring, summer, and autumn with cameras in hand and backlogs of film piling up to develop. We share our weekend trips on social media the week following an outing, and then do it all over again.
But when winter comes, we rest, like it’s natural for us to do. Our time with the camera lessens or even stops. Most terrifying of all, we run out of things to share on social media. And then we panic.
This can easily be blamed on social media, and it’s certainly exacerbated the problem. But this drive not to create, but to produce has been around since the first artist showed a painting on a cave wall and was asked “this great, Ogg, but what you do next?”
Art and consumption have always gone hand-in-hand, but art and consumption are blood enemies, as they should be. Is what we think of as our lack of inspiration actually just fear that we have nothing to produce, that we have no product? Maybe. We’ll get there.
But first let’s make sure we’re on the same page when it comes to inspiration. A lot of times when we talk about it, we’re actually talking about motivation. There are entire books written about the differences, but essentially, motivation is usually an external force driving us towards a goal. It’s almost transactional, but not in a bad way. Maybe we’re motivated to do a project or make a zine, or even finish a roll of film. Inspiration is internal, it comes from within ourselves. It’s often spontaneous and unpredictable, which renders most advice about it sort of pointless.
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How to Start, Kill, and Resurrect a Project
Monday, April 7, 2025 • Duration 29:41
All the way back in the first post, I told you about my travels and trials of the summer of 2024. I ever so briefly mentioned visiting and exploring some of the railroad towns along the Virginia/North Carolina border.
“I will have much more to say about these towns and this experience in the future (possibly a zine will come of it),” I said, long ago.
The future is now! And a book has come of it. [You can get it here.]
I’d like to tell you all about it, but I don’t want this just to be some commercial for the new book (which is called Outsider, and I’d love for you to see it). So, instead of just hawking the book, I’d like to take you through the process of how I produce a photography project. Every project must start with a plan.
The Plan
When I travel, I do so based almost entirely around photography. Every stop, every road, every minute of sunlight of every day is about what I can shoot, how, and when. Obviously, I can’t plan for everything, and last year’s trip humbled the hell out of me. But when I plan, I pretend that the plan will not go awry.
The bulk of this trip was about cemeteries. For the most part, I ignored the towns, focusing instead on the roads I could take between one old, abandoned cemetery and the next. I figured maybe I could shoot something along the way. It’s a method that has served me well for as long as I’ve done it.
There was one section, however, where I wanted to focus on the towns themselves. I used to do this almost exclusively – plan to drive the most interesting roads from one town to the next – and so falling back into that was simple.
I discovered these towns for myself through my friend Bob, a fellow photographer and traveler. He was able to capture these towns, focusing mostly on the railroads, but exploring the downtowns and sidestreets as he went. His photos reminded me enough of the ones I used to take, and I wanted a bit of that for myself. Along with Bob’s suggestions, I used Google Maps to solidify my plans.
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Kill Your Photography Idols and Love Them More
Thursday, March 27, 2025 • Duration 22:40
I’ve got two things to talk about today and they’re both sort of related. The first thing is about getting to know your favorite photographers better, but also why to not put them on a pedestal. Sort of. You’ll see.
And the second thing is about questions. Sometimes they’re annoying, but we need to be cool. I’ll explain why, but it’s basic human empathy.
Kill Your Idols (To Love Them More)
In punk rock, there used to be a saying “Kill Your Idols”. I think Sonic Youth made it popular, but it definitely existed before them. Above the many tenets and contradictory notions in punk rock, “kill your idols” is something that everyone generally agrees with, but almost nobody actually does.
Many of us in the punk scene, ignored the mainstream and focused on local scenes and independent music. While this is something that probably should be transferred into the photography scene, that’s not exactly what I’m talking about.
There are some photographers who seem to exist outside of time. Take the most famous photographer of them all: Ansel Adams. His career spanned decades and his most well-known photographs – those taken in our National Parks – have little obvious connection to a specific era. They might have been taken yesterday or 100 years ago.
We know some of his pieces so well that it’s hard to envision a life without them. They are a part of us, a part of American heritage. They have always existed and always will.
Because of this, taking Adams’s work as a whole is difficult. Where do we start? Even coffee table books containing hundreds of his photos disperse them almost randomly, with little thought given to the journey he was on, focusing instead on how these photos look to us now.
This makes sense, since the audience for these books are people who aren’t photographers and aren’t necessarily interested in the breadth of Adams's work.
I’m using Ansel as an example we can all relate to. But this is true with most photographers. And especially true with photographers not as well known as Adams.
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You Have Too Many Cameras, Let's Fix That
Monday, March 17, 2025 • Duration 25:54
I’ve got two pieces for you today. First, you’ve probably got way too many cameras, and I’d like to make you feel bad about that. Kidding, kidding. But I would like to talk about how we can and why we should narrow down the cameras we use.
Second is: this past week I got an idea and I want to run it by you. It involves Tolkien and the sea.
You Have Too Many Cameras
Last episode, I told you all about my hike into Bullet Canyon, weighed down by not enough water and a few too many cameras. While the water issue was a lesson well-learned, the camera situation was not.
On that hike, I brought along five different cameras. This was less than half of the cameras I brought along for the trip. I left seven or eight in the car.
My photography from this time was pretty hit or miss. I was still working with 35mm cameras, and was still dabbling in toy cameras. I had just gotten my Mamiya RB67 and had no idea how to really use it. I wasn’t exactly a novice, I had been shooting for years by that point. But I was unfocused, shooting an ever-changing variety of cameras. I was experimenting.
Historically, in the film era, most photographers had one camera. Some of the more wealthy ones had a few, but still, most focused upon a single camera. It wasn’t uncommon to settle on a specific emulsion and developer, as well.
They bought new cameras, of course, but often sold or gave away their old ones. Photographers were interested in the photos first, the cameras second.
With the plethora of used cameras ever since digital took over, the photograph has often taken a back seat to the camera. Or rather, the cameras. The many, many cameras.
There were camera and lens collectors back then, but they were pretty rare. Today, they’re almost the norm. It’s a safe bet that the majority of you listening to this have a half dozen or more cameras. I myself have several dozen. It’s honestly a bit ridiculous.
I have five Argus C3s (aka The Brick). Why? I’ve got four or five Exaktas, a couple of Pentax, various 620 cameras, a few old box cameras, two RB67s, some random 4x5s, and my god, I really hate talking about gear.
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Balancing Photography and Hiking
Tuesday, April 29, 2025 • Duration 31:30
I had packed the night before - camera, film, water, food. I had checked maps, selected my trails, and committed them to memory. This would be an easy hike, I thought, but then recalibrated. I am out of shape, this is the first hike of the year (first hike in a year), and I haven’t felt great in months. This will be what it is.
It’s not that I didn’t care, but I had to get out. The winter and early spring of Seattle was suffocating me. The constant noise of cars, the echo of far too many voices, the monotony of concrete and asphalt and concrete was walling me off, brick by brick.
There’s a balance we try to strike as photographers between living in the moment and photographing that moment. It’s impossible to do both, though we often tell ourselves otherwise.
We lie to ourselves, saying that while we are experiencing the through the lens, it’s still happening and we are still fully present. We want so badly for this to be true, even when we’re not hiding behind the camera. Experiencing the moment without the filter of a lens grows terrifying the more time we spend behind it.
It was tempting to leave the camera at home, but of course I didn’t.
What I did was a compromise I made with myself years ago. Each hike, I make some vague attempt to carry my camera inside my pack. Of course, this runs antithetical to the photographer’s philosophy/film manufacturer’s marketing slogan of always having a camera at the ready.
This, I’ve found, allows me to experience the moment first, and then hide behind my camera. This also means not capturing some of the moments. But then, this is also a rule I end up breaking to no real advantage by the end of the hike.
With large format a pack is necessary. There’s really no other way to carry a tripod and camera that needs a tripod (as well as film holders) into the field. But I’ve also started doing it with medium format, lugging the boat anchor known as the Mamiya RB67 on my back.
When I see something worth a photograph, I sling off the pack, unroll the top, take out the camera bag, take out the camera, and shoot. This entire operation requires only thirty seconds or so. The lens is already on the camera, the film is already loaded. All I need to do is check the light.
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However It Happened, James Was Dead
Thursday, April 17, 2025 • Duration 30:27
Spring Ranch is "known" as the most haunted ghost town in Nebraska, though I'm not sure by which metric it achieved that knowing.
Spring Ranch Cemetery looks like any normal cemetery. There's a gateway, a lane down the middle and your typical array of stones on either side.
While I was there photographing, I felt no hauntings, no specters, spooks or haints. There are no ghosts in the ghost town of Spring Ranch, and the cemetery is filled with the town's history, parceled out for those who can read it in marble and granite.
I walked softly in Spring Ranch Cemetery. There is a hard history here that you can almost feel. It’s not so different from other pioneer cemeteries. It was hard everywhere in the late 1800s. The life they chose was backbreaking and mentally torturous.
This can be seen hiding under the soft veneer of county histories and family recollections. Spring Ranch probably wasn’t much harder than any of the thousands of other frontier towns. But I quickly uncovered two stories that describe and define just how Spring Ranch, and the frontier in general, could break you.
Though it contains somewhere around 100 stones, this is one of the larger cemeteries I’ve photographed. My preference lies in the small, abandoned cemeteries dotting the west. But Spring Ranch is almost sprawling in comparison. The main cemetery drive still exists down the center, but on the sides and in the corners are small gatherings of stones here and there.
Most are family plots, separated and set aside for no other reason than the cemetery never got the chance to fill itself out. One such assemblage caught me.
There was a row of five stones, neatly placed. On the left, the two farthest apart belong to Margaret and John Jones, husband and wife. John died first in 1882, not living long enough to bear witness to what came after. His wife, Margaret, lived to see it all, dying in 1894.
To the right are three additional stones, somewhat clustered together. Margaret and John had two children, Elizabeth and Thomas, born in 1848 and 1851, respectively.
The Jones Family came to America from Wales, arriving probably in the 1860s. They, like the others, came west across the Plains and settled in Spring Ranch. By the time they settled, Elizabeth and Thomas were likely near to adulthood.
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As I worked at my job, I formed some ideas. Nothing concrete, nothing written down (unfortunately), but a small speck to build from. I figured that if it was going to come together as a larger piece, it would eventually just come together as a larger piece.
Keep in mind, this wasn’t my whole day. I didn’t stare into the ceiling lights, mouth gaping to ponder whatever I was about to come up with. I went through my day as a normal human - I worked, I drove home, I ate, I listened to both sides of the Charles Mingus Black Saint and the Sinner Lady record, watched some TV, and then I wrote. Like normal humans do.
I sat down around 7 pm to write this out. It had grown some and by this point, I was thinking of almost nothing else. I even knew the photo I was going to use for the words.
Before my fingers hit the keys, I had the first paragraph memorized:
We embrace the imperfections of film photography — the dust, the lint, the missed focus, and poor development — as if what we’re photographing is perfect.
I went on to write seven or eight paragraphs more. I got it all down in an instant. It took thirty minutes of composition. I did some light editing. Then some more. I moved this here and that there. I corrected my tenses (I often have problems with tenses, as well as passive voice which barely makes sense to me - I have problems with getting sidetracked too), and it was final and complete.
While I was writing and editing this, I was also doing some extra lint removal in the photo editing software I use. It was basic cloning tool stuff. I like to do it myself rather than let whatever scanning software I have do it.
For writing, I should use a program that autosaves. Almost everything does now, and it’s pretty handy. But the program I use for writing about photos is a simple photo tagging program not at all meant for writing. It doesn’t even have spell check. Rather than write somewhere else and then copy/paste it into this tagging program, I cut out the middleman and just wrote it there.
The problem is that when I saved it with the tagging program, the text was embedded within the photo file itself as a comment tag. So after I removed all the lint I could, I saved the photo again, but in the photo editing software. Doing this overwrote the entire file, including the tags and comments, completely deleting everything I wrote.
And it was gone. I tried a variety of different things, but in the end, it no longer existed.
I was angry and sad. Pissed off at myself, I got up and walked it off. I came back to the keyboard and there was nothing. I could recall much of the first paragraph, but nothing of anything else.
I took a breath. And then another. And still nothing. Utterly disgusted with myself I went to bed. Thirty minutes later, I got up to try again. Nothing. Nothing.
After writing a quick and cranky synopsis of what happened, I uploaded the photo, including the new and fairly meaningless text to share the next day. Something grumpy about being angry and sad and pissed off at myself.
The next morning on the drive to work, parts of it began to come back to me. There were little phrases like “light so perfect, angles so square” and “shadows revealing even less than we see.” I mean, it’s not Shakespeare, but things were starting to re-form as I drove.
I feared that it would all come back on I-5 north and I would have no way of getting it down.
When I got to work, without even taking off my coat, I took out my notebook and a pencil and wrote everything I could. I wrote in scratches and scribbles, crossing out entire sentences and drawing arrows to place this here or that there. So many arrows.
Fifteen minutes later, there it was. More or less complete, but also a complete mess spread over two pages of notebook.
There were some edits and a bit of rewriting, but it was finished. Maybe it’s a little different from what I wrote the previous night, but still. Finished.
What didn’t escape me, even the night before, was just how this entire process from creation through destruction to creation again was a perfect exemplar for the piece I had written.
So now, here it is:
We Embrace the Imperfections of Film Photography
We embrace the imperfections of film photography — the dust, the lint, the shifting colors, and poor development — as if what we're photographing is itself perfect by comparison.
As if our lives all around us aren’t faltering and broken, we compose to pleasing forms and sacred ratios, every shot a reach for perfection, the angles so perfect, the lines so square.
We hold close the warmth of analog with half-truths and the imagination that life is surface noise and that we see in grain.
These blemishes, so perfectly symbolic, are cherished as aesthetic, as decoration; the light leaks in only so much, the shadows reveal less than we see.
We decry the performative, what we judge dishonest while practicing faces and poses. We perform for ourselves like actors on stage, creating scenes and moments.
And when everything is made just so, when our movements are placed just right, when the light and shadow and time all play their roles, we play our own. We open the shutter and we imagine this is honesty, that this is somehow not performative.
We enjoy the waiting, the holding still and counting, where angles, composition, and golden light entwine in this feigned perfection chased and ruthlessly hunted.
It ends in a moment so fleeting and immediate that its preservation must be tangible to us. The fate of all this motion and struggle must necessarily be captured and framed to stillness; matted and muted, displayed on a wall like some trophy perfected.
We capture on film what we love, the friends, those nearest, the refuge we have made for ourselves. But we have held the crumbling photos of our grandparents, the shattered ambrotypes in stained boxes, shards and splinters where the finest resolution once clung fast and forever.
Our negatives and photos, we know, are not lasting. Our prints, even archival, fade with time, even in darkness where they live unseen anyway.
Our lives end, our cameras break; the memories die unglorious and forgotten without ceremony, like ourselves, and not even ghosts remain.
We still herald these so small imperfections, the missed focus, the decay, and that time we rolled the film backward. These nearly random cuts and scars are our inoculation against our larger creation: our own lives and the world we built.
As if the lint and specks, the dust and endless cat hair play their parts, standing in for all manner of life’s terrors and dismays, for wars and broken treaties, for disease and death. But our creation, flawed and performed, brittle and impermanent, in the end, is our own.
We embrace the imperfections of film photography because we cannot embrace the imperfections of life without this filter, this art form standing between ourselves and our world destroying itself. We cannot look upon, cannot live through all this destruction without our own creation to behold.
And there it is. To be honest, I don’t have a clue what to do with it. But it’s there. I got to thinking about the arguments between film and digital and just how stupid and shallow they are. And then I just wrote to see where it would take me.
There’s quite a bit of writing left in me, so maybe it’s best that we just revisit this another time.
Photo Words: Photography!
If you follow me on Instagram, you’ll know that I have a fascination with words and their origins. So it’s no huge surprise that I’d take this opportunity to talk about words. Photography is filled with strange words like shutter, aperture, and composition - all words I’ll eventually get to. But for now, I’d like to begin at the beginning - Photography.
Photography is a “new” word invented around the time photography itself was invented. Strangely enough, there’s some controversy around who exactly coined the term. Its first public appearance was in 1839, (remember, photography as we now know it was invented the year before by Louis Daguerre) in a German newspaper by an astronomer writing about Henry Fox Talbot. That same year, another astronomer, John Herschel, also apparently used the word, though nobody seems to remember where.
There was a possible earlier use by a French painter named Hercules Florance in some notes in 1835, but that claim seems unproven at best. Regardless, by 1839, the term was coined and quickly gained popularity.
It also quickly spun off a slew of words: photograph: as a verb meaning the act of taking a photograph, which was its noun form, meaning the end result of photography.
Photographer, on the other hand, would take another decade to wander onto the scene. We’re always late, so it makes some sense.
Curiously, the word photogenic came a few years earlier in 1835 when our friend Henry Fox Talbot used it as an alternative word for his sciagraphic process, which made a picture with just shadows and outlines - it wasn’t quite a photograph though. By 1839, it basically became another word for photographic (as in the photogenic process).
Photography wasn’t the first word to use photo in what’s known as a word’s “combining form.” That honor goes to photosphere from 1664. It described the effulgence emanating from Jesus as he peaced out into the heavens.
Though it seems like the combination of photo and genic would naturally mean to produce light, that meaning wouldn’t show up until 1863. Additionally, it wouldn’t mean that something was lovely to photograph until the 1920s in America.
Anyway, back to photograph. We know where it came from (sort of), but why the combination of photo and graph?
We get photo from the Greek “photo” and “phos” meaning simply light. It’s the same word that gave us phantom and phantasm, as well as fantasy and what was originally fantasy’s abbreviation, fancy. All of them had something to do with light and image, literally or metaphorically.
As for the “graph” in photograph, it seems to have come to us through French, and to them through either Greek -graphos or Latin -graphus or both. Its original definition was something that is written. Pinning down a date is a tough one though.
So there you have it - a photograph is light written down. Maybe it’s not the perfect word for it, but here we are. And if you wanted to shorten it to photo, you’d have to wait till 1860 when Queen Victoria herself used it.
Quick Note on Social Media
Social media is in a bit of flux right now. Twitter is basically a Nazi paradise, and Facebook is some next level of hell. Instagram, owned by Facebook’s parent company Meta, is where most photographers share their work, and that too is trying to become a TikTok clone, leaving regular photographers with not much reason to stick around.
I’ve been slowly migrating to two places: Blue Sky and Foto. Blue Sky is like Twitter before Elon and Foto is like Instagram ten years ago, but without the filters. There’s no competition between the two as both focus upon fairly different things. Both, however, have very little tolerance for fascism, and that’s nice, times being what they are.
There are others, of course. Pixelfed is essentially an old Instagram clone, but slow, buggy, and confusing. I can’t see it catching on. Mastodon (similar to Pixelfed in the confusing ways) is an old Twitter clone, but Blue Sky seems to be winning that little battle. Speaking of Blue Sky, they’re releasing their own photo app soon, but it seems to be attached to the Blue Sky app in the same way that Threads is attached to Instagram.
Of course, there’s always Flickr. There’s always been Flickr. I’ve been on it since something like 2004. That’s two decades. They’re owned by Smug Mug, but nobody over there seems all that interested in competing against any of the other apps. I still use it as part of my workflow, but I can’t recommend it. The free version allows only 1000 uploads, then you’re done. As far as social media or even photo sharing goes, that’s dumb and a good way to get out of having to deal with new customers.
I’m @consofcart on BlueSky and @conspiracyofcartographers on Foto. It would have made sense for me to use the same name on both, but that ship has sailed. Oh, and on Flickr, just search for Conspiracy of Cartographers and you’ll find me. Oddly, their search engine is one of the best out there.
To help out a bit on Blue Sky, I created what they call a “Starter Pack” for film photographers. Starter packs are basically lists of accounts someone gathered, usually under a certain topic of field. Mine features around 100 film photographers. You can select which ones you’d like to follow or catch them all like we’re all just a bunch of Pokemon here for your amusement. If you’re a film photographer and not yet on the list, hit me up and I’ll add you.
I am a stubborn person. Getting a hotel room is almost out of the question. I figured that if I was going to be nauseated, I might as well be nauseated while driving.
After a few hours at the rest area and feeling slightly better, I started to drive. Most turnpikes have emergency pull-outs every mile or so. I used almost every one of these until the next rest area, where I again stopped. It just wasn’t going away.
I crossed into Ohio, and eventually, the nausea calmed some. My stomach was empty, but I was still too nauseated to eat. By Pennsylvania, I was exhausted. Every ounce of strength and effort had been spent on the road. When I rolled into my old hometown, I had nothing at all left in me.
The next morning, the nausea was gone, but it had taken my will with it. The day after that, I got a bit better. I spent two weeks at my parents’ house in varying degrees of nausea, stress, and exhaustion.
My first thought was that I somehow made myself carsick. This was all but confirmed by riding along with my father on a few short drives. It wasn’t consistent, but it seemed like I was getting carsick.
The time with my parents was good. I was able to get out and photograph some cemeteries as well as the town of Shamokin, which became the subject of my latest book Anthracite.
Last Summer Got Worse
I left my parents’ house and gave myself two and a half weeks to return to Seattle. Along the way, I wanted to explore a bit of Virginia and North Carolina, as well as stop in Missouri, Kansas, and a few other places.
Normally, I have a route and see places along that route, almost never staying more than a night in any single location. This time, however, I decided to find a couple of towns and explore the surrounding area in loops that would bring me back to the same campsite each night.
I don’t think I mentioned this - I camp. It’s rare that I stay in a hotel room. Out of the thirty days on the road, usually around 28 nights of them are spent inside a tent. I love it and it’s cheap or free. If I didn’t travel this way, I couldn’t afford to travel at all.
Because I stayed too long at my parents’ house, I had to cut down some of these loops. But that would come soon enough. First, I wanted to explore some railroad towns in Virginia and North Carolina.
I will have much more to say about these towns and this experience in the future (possibly a zine will come of it).
Three things happened almost simultaneously. First, the nausea came back. Second, the temperatures went from the low to mid-80s to triple digits. Third, my air conditioning went out.
The nausea seemed to be related to the road, especially the interstate. When I travel, I almost never use the interstates. I’m all for backroads and a lot of stopping. But this trip required them, and every time I was on one, I got gripped with intense nausea. And when I knew I would have to be on one, I’d spiral into anxiety and would receive the nausea in that way. It got to the point where I didn’t know which came first and which was the symptom.
If I could have just gotten on Interstate 80 and sped back to Seattle in a handful of days, I would have. But I had learned my lesson on the trip east. So going slow was necessary. And that was the plan all along anyway.
I did my best to keep to my schedule. Now, in most years, the schedule needs to be flexible. It needs to change with everything that happens around me. This year the schedule had to be forgotten. This was convenient, since I wrote out my schedule on a notepad and forgot it at home.
My maps still showed the roads and routes I wanted to take, but not where I hoped to be each night. And not the number of days I anticipated the trip home to take.
I won’t take you day-by-day through my trip. I honestly don’t remember much of it anyway. The heat was oppressive and the nausea was various shades of debilitating.
Two nights were spent in the Land Between the Lakes, an 170,000 acre chunk of public land on the Kentucky/Tennessee border. I fell in love with the place, exploring dirt roads and old cemeteries, old homesteads and churches. I can’t recommend it enough.
The plans were to stay in Coffeeyville, Kansas for the next three nights, exploring the loops I mapped out the previous winter. But I also needed to get my air conditioning fixed. I had it flushed and checked for leaks a couple of times so far on the trip, but nobody could sort it out.
Pulling into nearby Independence, Kansas, I stopped at a shop recommended by another shop, and they took the whole thing apart, found the leak and tried to fix it. For three days in a row. Most of those days, I sat outside the shop waiting. I’d explore some in the evenings and even in the mornings before they opened. I camped at a nearby lake.
On the fourth day, they said they probably fixed it unless pieces of the pump found their way into the evaporator. If that was the case, there’s nothing anyone could do apart from replacing the entire air conditioning system, which they couldn’t do without the parts which would take a week to get there.
A lot of money later, I left the next morning and it promptly stopped working again. The nausea also returned, requiring me to stop every few miles to … actually, I’m not sure what. Rest? At that point, I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I figured it was motion sickness and that stopping would help. Which it did, in a way.
The nausea would come in waves and then leave. Sometimes it would come back. Sometimes it wouldn’t. Sometimes it seemed to react to food or lack of food. Sometimes it seemed fully independent of anything I was doing.
I eventually wound up in Grand Junction, Colorado. Camping again, I ate a little that evening and was utterly plagued by nausea and heat. The next morning, with temperatures somehow still in the 90s, with my AC out, and with my inability to eat anything, I had quite the nervous breakdown while driving through town.
Realizing that I might not actually be able to drive myself home, I talked myself into eating. I understood that even though I was nauseated, I was also very undernourished. I had been eating almost nothing since North Carolina. I forced myself to down a plate of tofu and broccoli at a Chinese restaurant, knowing it would likely bring on the nausea. I also had to hit the interstate again, which would apparently also do the same.
I-70 into Utah was a mess. The afternoon sun was melting me; my phone, which I used for navigation, wouldn’t charge because it was too hot in the car. My nausea required frequent stops, and everything I wanted to photograph was left unshot.
I can’t convey how much I did not shoot compared the the previous years. I had such big plans! I had actually convinced myself to travel in a slightly different way (the loops thing), and I think it might have worked if not for the various maladies befalling the entire trip. It had slowly become a war of attrition which I was quickly losing.
The broccoli and tofu did enough of the trick to get me into Utah and Idaho. I don’t remember much of the run at this point. I had plans for Idaho, but I always have plans for Idaho. These plans are almost always pushed aside to get home.
Through clouds of nausea, I finished the trip, leaving the interstate even through Oregon to spare myself any further problems. It didn’t work as well as I hoped, but I got home.
Autumn, Okay?
For the rest of the summer, I sat myself at home except for one trip to eastern Washington. It was supposed to be a two-night ramble, but turned into a short daytrip. Nausea and lack of food again.
Photographically, I spent the autumn developing film. I had taken a hundred or so 4x5 photos in various small cemeteries across the country. There were literally hundreds of cemeteries I had hoped to visit that I could not, but I didn’t walk away from this venture empty-handed.
I also had fifty or so rolls of film. I still haven’t developed the color shots from the railroad towns in Virginia and North Carolina. There’s a long reason why, but it’s actually several reasons, none of which are all that pertinent to the story right now.
As for the nausea, I’ve been to the doctor a few times and was given suggestions ranging from “we won’t know without testing” to “maybe a few different things.” Due to the whole insurance thing, I have to see a new doctor, but that hasn’t happened yet and won’t until March.
The nausea comes and goes and has become essentially chronic at this point. I have bad days and less bad days. There is rarely a day that I’m not affected by it. But I have figured out its schedule and what doesn’t cause it (it’s not motion sickness or anxiety or interstates or even certain foods). I’d rather not have medical advice unless you’re a gastrologist, which you probably aren’t.
I hope to get it all sorted out before the real photography season starts for me this spring. And maybe I even will. If I don’t, then I’ll have to find ways to deal with it while on the road (a much more impossible task).
What’s Next?
It’s odd planning a year’s worth of photography not knowing if any of it will happen. That’s always there, of course. Life is life and sometimes it just isn’t what you want it to be. But this seems a little more ominous. Of course, I could always photograph stuff in Seattle. I’ve done it before and have enjoyed it. I just don’t want to do that.
As I said above, this past year I released a book and I think there’s another one - a small one - yet to be developed. That might come in the spring.
I also have hundreds of 4x5 photos taken on x-ray film of pioneer graves and small cemeteries. My original plan had been to make one huge book out of it and be done with the project entirely. But then I noticed two things.
First, my most recent book did not sell well at all. It was the largest book I’ve made to date and thus the most expensive and therefore the fewest sales and I’d like to not repeat that mistake.
Second, I really enjoy photographing cemeteries. Like a lot. They are places where I can relax with my photography, where I can set up various shots, try new things, and never have to worry about a landowner or nosey local shoo-shooing me away. Nobody bothers you in a cemetery. And the cemeteries I visit are usually so out of the way that nobody even knows I’m there.
If I were more savvy at marketing schemes, I’d release books for each state filled with photos and stories from their local cemeteries. But I’d be afraid that I’d have to change what I do quite a bit. My photos of these graves are often pretty impressionistic. I love that, but it’s not what most people are looking for in their books on cemeteries.
My plan, then, is to release a book or so of cemetery photography every year or so. No pressure on me, and I can keep prices low. The mathematics and finances work out much better that way as well.
I have more than enough photos to release a small book right now, and maybe that’s the next thing I’ll work on.
This Place (Substack)
My journey through all this will be on display for those who want to read it. I miss doing the podcast (All Through a Lens) and this fills the gap a bit.
I won’t moan on about my mystery ailments, I assure you. Instead, I plan/hope to regale you with stories of my travels, of historical this and photographical that. I’m aiming for this to be weekly-ish and would love for you to tag along.
I also carried my lunch, some snacks, and 1.5 gallons of water. This would be a ten mile hike along some fairly rough trails. I sliprockhad my map, my ten essentials, and a little less courage than I thought I might.
Through the night I heard coyotes and owls. But there were no visitors, no other campers, no other hikers. I drifted into sleep alone and woke up before dawn alone.
Striking my tent in the pre-dawn, I stashed it in my car parked at the trailhead. I slid my arm through a strap on my pack, and then the other, jumping a bit to settle the weight. I buckled the belt, picked up my trekking poles and looked out over the canyon once more. The light was enough that I could see much of the day before me, though much of the canyon was hidden behind bends and turns.
At the start of the trail is a register. Every hiker is expected to sign in, noting the date and time. I was the only hiker in over a month. If anything happened to me, there’s almost no chance I’d be stumbled upon before I was bones. I had told folks at home where I’d be hiking and when to expect me: probably around 1pm, but 3 or even 4pm at the latest, and if I wasn’t back by five, they knew to contact emergency services. There was limited cell service at the trailhead and nothing at all in the canyon. Except me. I was the only one here.
I stood overlooking the canyon two hundred feet below me. There was no real path to get inside, though I could see one at the bottom leading to a dry wash that would serve as a trail. There were car-size sandstone boulders strewn along the descent. There were a few juniper trees clinging as they could to various smaller cliffs. And I picked my way along them, lowering myself, sliding from tree to tree, and wondering how the hell I was going to get back up.
The thought of turning around haunted me and I brushed it aside. There was some danger, to be sure, but it’s not like this was an unexplored trail. I would pull myself out of the canyon when it was time.
A number of rock cairns guided me from sliprock to sliprock until I finally reached the bottom: a red and hardened sand wash among some taller junipers. The sun must have been up by then, but I wouldn’t be able to see it until it was much higher in the sky. And by then, I knew I needed to be nearly at my turnaround spot, about five miles down the canyon from where I now stood.
The descent took something like two hours.
I rested for a few minutes when I hit the bottom, and then continued, making good time as the walls of the canyon grew taller and more narrow as the wash cut deeper into the land. I walked and felt the weight of the pack. Mostly, it was the water. A gallon and a half weighs over 12lbs. I considered stashing some of it along the trail, but if I were going to do that, I would have carried an extra bottle. I was going to need all 12lbs of this water. With that, I took a drink.
As I walked, I could already feel the temperatures inside the canyon rising. It can be as much as ten degrees hotter inside than on top. The air is compressed down here and compressed air releases heat. The difference wouldn’t be so stark just yet, but as the hours wore on and as I pressed on, soon I would feel it.
Not long after starting from the bottom, a stone tower overlooked me on the cliff heights above. It was today’s first Ancient Puebloan ruin, and much too high for my lenses. I paused for a moment in appreciation and felt like I was being observed from above.
This tower saw me lumber on, pack now weighing upon me, digging into my shoulders. There wasn’t pain so much, but I could tell that pain wasn’t far away. My feet weren’t yet aching, but they would be before long. And it saw me take another drink.
The trail itself isn’t really a trail at all, and it’s hardly ever used. It’s a dry wash, sometimes deep with sand, sometimes (and more usually) strewn with the debris of flash floods — trees, boulders, a tangled mess to stumble and cut my way through.
There were miles of this, with the canyon meandering and bending sometimes almost back in upon itself. And with each mile, I descended deeper into Grand Gulch. The canyon walls grew taller as the temperatures rose higher.
I was often fully exposed out of necessity. The easiest path was the wash, with much of the rest of the floor tangled in brush and thorns. The wash was also a highway of sorts for wildlife. Mostly it was deer prints, pressed softly into the red earth. Here and there were small skittery footprints of lizards and rodents. At times there were side paths, likely made by animals, and sometimes they were shortcuts. Other times they simply disappeared into thickets. It was best to tramp out in the open. But it was also hot.
The sun had finally found its way into my narrow skies, though by now the canyon was widening and still growing deeper, like I was being swallowed. I walked with the 35mm Ricoh around my neck, snapping a shot here and there.
There were times when the canyon floor would open up to an almost pastoral setting. Golden grasses waved in whatever breeze was blessing us, and at one point, a tall cottonwood tree grew among them. With the sun now higher, its leaves twinkled and I did my best to photograph it.
But then the canyon closed up once more, the walls grew nearer, and the floor dropped about six or seven feet. If this dry stream bed wasn’t dry, here would have spilled a waterfall. I assessed the situation. I could slide down it, but could I scramble back up? There was no way around this. Though the top of the canyon here was wide, the stream had cut a near perfect V shape, funneling everything, including me, to this drop.
With no small amount of apprehension, I slid down the dry waterfall. At the bottom was a rock cairn marking the way, almost tauntingly as there was no other way to go.
Here the path was narrow and the closest walls very close. This cast shadows even in the late morning. I stopped here to do a full rest and take a drink.
A full rest, at least for me, is where I take my pack off and lie down with no weight on my feet. I try to do this for ten minutes. When I’m anxious and excited it is less. When I am dragging and beat, it is more. Now it was less. I was still feeling good.
I removed the Ansco Color Clipper from my pack and took a bad photo of the dry waterfall. I exchanged it with the Ricoh, always wanting to have one camera at the ready. This would also distribute the weight. My shoulders might give some faint thanks, but my knees and feet would not tell the difference.
The going was slow and I was slow and stopped here and there for photos and water. It had been four hours since I had reached the bottom. The sun was not quite at meridian, but was closer than I had hoped. I was not making good time, though the point of this hike wasn’t to get back quickly, but to experience the Ancient Puebloan cliff dwellings. And now, after nearly six hours total since I left camp, they were here. Somewhere.
Within a half-mile of each other were the two main sites I wanted to visit. This canyon and an adjoining one contain dozens of such places with pictographs and petroglyphs decorating them all. Today, I had time only for two. But these were the two prized sites. And they were here before me if I could only find them.
One of the features of these cliff dwellings is that they were difficult to spot and difficult to access. I knew roughly where they were, and scanned the cliff walls with squinted eyes.
Two circles about a hundred or more feet up caught my eye. There it was, Jailhouse Ruins, the second of the two sites, which meant that I missed the first, known as Perfect Kiva.
Getting close wouldn’t be an issue. The canyon was carved out in layers and moving from one layer to the next usually wasn’t an issue. But to move up several, which I’d have to do, didn’t look so simple.
Soon, I was standing about thirty feet below Jailhouse Ruins. I scrambled up a short ledge, and then another. And then saw that I wouldn’t be able to do this with my pack on. This was a problem since the whole reason I was there was to photograph the ruins on 4x5.
Quick philosophies swam through my thoughts – was I being taught a lesson in detachment? Was Bears Ears playing some practical joke? Or did I just need to figure it out?
All this while I was balancing on a sliver of a sandstone ledge. Two hundred feet below me was the canyon floor. Less than ten feet above me was the ruin. I would have to shimmy around a jutted-out boulder, and then squeeze between this sliver and another boulder while hoisting myself up and over onto another ledge. I had the strength to do this, but barely.
But first, my pack had to go. And by that I mean, my pack had to go first. I unbuckled the front and carefully slid it off my shoulders. With a heave and a grunt, I threw the pack over my head to the ledge above me. Now I had to make it.
I clung tight to this sandstone boulder as I edged my feet under it. I could feel the gravity pulling me backwards and made sure to keep moving and to not look down. There was no real room for failure here, and fortunately, I worked my way around the first boulder, and now with my back against another, I was able to pull and push myself up. With another heave and another grunt, I was up. With the adrenaline coursing through my veins, my heart pounding, I had made it.
My legs were bloody from the rough stone and scraping, but here I was once again with my pack. And here was Jailhouse Ruin before me.
I had seen many ruins before this one. There are scores of them much more accessible than these. But these are almost untouched. Many ruins in our National Parks have been excavated and restored to the point where they won’t fall over. But not these. While there was no danger of them collapsing, they were clearly old.
The Ancient Puebloans lived in this area roughly 1000 years ago. This structure was built over 500 years before white men would begin colonizing the “new world.” I had seen things in America this old, but never like this. Never so raw, so close. And never so alone.
Jailhouse Ruin gets its name because the builder of this ruin decided to put a window in the dwelling. That alone isn’t rare, but the maker placed crossed sticks creating a much more modern-looking window that somebody at some point thought looked like a jail.
I moved closer to the window, which was just a little too high for me to see inside. This dwelling is built under the overhang of the cliff. Rocks were placed with mud mortar like bricks, creating a room. I moved along the wall to where the door would have been and looked inside.
The floor was strewn with broken shards of painted pots. Some were made of red earth and had lighter stripes, others were made of white earth with dark stripes. Some had decorative grooves sculpted into them.
A little deeper inside I found small corn cobs. They were much smaller than our corn today — only slightly larger than baby corn. I picked one up. It was light, almost weightless. This was 1000 years old. 1000 years ago, someone packed corn up from where it grew on the canyon floor, shucked it, and ground the kernels into flour. Right here, right where I was standing.
On the smooth canyon wall which made up the inner wall of this dwelling, there were various pictographs made with pigments. There were animals, and a few red chevrons and a cluster of hand prints made by the artist placing their hand on the wall and blowing pigment out of their mouth creating a negative hand. Next to these were the small outlined hands of a child, held up by their parent so they could be memorialized as well.
There are rare times where you can feel a real human connection to ancient cultures. Usually we experience them in museums or places where the context has been excavated out of existence. But here was the sweetest exchange between a parent and child and I closed my eyes and imagined the scene, opening them again to tears. Every step of my hike was worth this.
I didn’t think to photograph the hands with my film cameras. I think part of me just didn’t want to. I knew that if I did, I would share them, and I wanted this moment to be for me alone. I dried my eyes and got to work.
At this point in my photography I was all over the place. I had not yet found any particular style or even reason to photograph. All I knew was that I wanted to shoot as much as I could without completely running out of film.
With the Intrepid 4x5, I seem to have shot only two photos here. Thinking back, that doesn’t make sense. Why would I do so little? I don't have a good answer apart from I just didn’t want to carry more film.
I set up the tripod at the door of the dwelling and regretted not bringing my much wider 90mm lens. Working with what I had, I snapped the photo and turned the camera nearly 180 degrees around to show the view back up the canyon. I could see so far below the small path over the grassy hill leading to the dwelling. I took a long drink of water.
Packing up the 4x5, I got to work with the other cameras, sometimes taking the same shots twice. Very few of these are worth looking at, to be honest. I carried too many cameras and just couldn’t focus upon what I actually wanted to photograph.
I drank some more water and ate my lunch where a family had eaten theirs a millennium ago. I laid back on my pack and took it all in. The sun was high and it was well past 1pm. I had a lot of ground to cover and still another site to see.
With pack in hand, I tried to sort out how I was going to get down to the floor once again. Though I had taken it in small segments and could again, the danger of losing my balance while sliding down various boulders, especially with my pack throwing me off balance, was daunting.
Fortunately, I carry about thirty feet of paracord with me. I fetched it from my pack, tied it to both straps, and lowered it down about twenty feet, where it finally rested. I dropped the cord and worked my way down to the pack. It was difficult and dangerous, but I hardly remember it now. All I know is that soon enough, I was on the canyon floor and hiking back up to the site I missed – Perfect Kiva.
This too was well above me, and I scanned once again for some sign. The going was rough. Any slide from my trip in was now a scramble. And soon I was off the path looking closer for the kiva site.
Several times I went off-trail looking,, climbing and scrambling, stopping, and then sliding down. I picked my way along cliff faces and stumbled here and there across this wide canyon floor. Here I likely added about a mile to my hike. I was cognisant of this and, taking another drink, realized that I might need to start budgeting water. Now I could drink only when thirsty.
After a number of these wayward excursions, I spied the Perfect Kiva site. There was a high and broad ledge with a couple of structures built upon it. The kiva (essentially an underground circular room) was somewhere close by.
Because I was off trail, there was no simple way to get there. I had to jump and climb from boulder to boulder rather than follow a relatively well-trod path. In one such foray, I had to leap somewhat down onto the side of a boulder and allow myself to slide down to the ledge below it. The slide was only a foot or so, but I hit the boulder hard, knocking the air out of my lungs. I slid to the ledge and clung to the rock until I could breathe again.
I knew all of this was too dangerous and a little stupid, but I pushed on without incident. And now I was standing above the opening to Perfect Kiva.
This is the only place in the canyon that has been somewhat reconstructed, though I don’t know to what extent. The wooden ladder held together with steel carriage bolts was obviously new. But as I descended into the chamber, I couldn’t tell if the roof was restored or what exactly was done by modern humans.
But I also didn’t care. The floor was original, the walls and carved out seats were as well. The canyon itself is quiet. Sometimes you’ll hear a bird or a jet passing overhead. But inside the kiva, the sound was dead.
And it was refreshing and cool, out of the sunlight, out of the heat. The fires that burned here 1000 years ago still clung to the walls, and I wanted to stay here forever.
I unpacked my 4x5 and took a 60 second long exposure of the ladder. Again I wished I had brought the wider lens.
Atop once again, I shot a couple more photos with the 4x5 and then returned to my plethora of cameras. I was now regretting bringing so many, but I figured that something in at least one of them would come out. I was playing the odds, the law of averages.
I was playing the odds with time as well. I had five miles left in the hike. Looking at the GPS, I had already done seven – two more than I thought I would by this point. I didn’t even have to check my water. I knew I had less than half left. The day was getting hotter, and the sun would be directly over the canyon for the rest of the day. There was also the climb out.
The one thing in my favor was that I was familiar with the trail. This was a canyon, a nearly impossible place to get lost. On the way in, I had gone off-trail a few times looking for a shortcut, and had to turn around. Those mistakes wouldn’t be made again. Just stick to the trail and I’d be fine.
But I was truly exhausted. The climbs, the scrambles, the heat were all taking their toll upon me. The pack dug into my shoulders and hips. There was no other option, however. I collected myself, strapped on my pack, took a small drink of water, and began the steady slog back up the canyon.
After a mile, I stopped for water. And then again. I knew I was rationing, and I didn’t abuse it, but the temperatures were nearing 100F. Whenever I rested, which became more regular, I made sure to do so in the shade of one of the trees inside the canyon. Each time I did, it became more difficult to return to the trail. Each time I rested, I never drank as much water as I was sweating away.
At the dry waterfall, where the canyon walls grow tall and narrow, I stopped and laid down, pack still on my back. I closed my eyes and wished for sleep. The rocks, in the shade most of the day, were cooling and restorative. The way the light shown upon the chute of the waterfall caught my eye. I took off my pack, removed my 4x5, opened the tripod without extending the legs, loaded a holder into the camera, and took my only large format color shot of the day. I never had to get on my feet for this.
I drank some more water, and then packed it all away, slowly stood and made a weird scramble up the dry waterfall. I was around halfway back to the trailhead.
Here, I was making good time. With some quick calculations, I reasoned that I would get back to the top at around 4:00, a full hour before anyone was to call emergency services for me. I could do this.
I tramped along slowly, but in a steady manner, keeping to the trail. But as the canyon grew shorter, I returned to the boulders I scrambled over at the start of my hike. There was no trail here, just rocks and crawling. With each boulder came a deeper level of exhaustion. I was lying flat on each, baking in the sun, but at least not moving.
With another drink, I knew how much water I wanted to save for the ascent. It had taken the better part of two hours to descend, but I knew the trip back up would be much quicker. I stopped drinking to ensure I’d have enough. My skin was cold and goosebumps were rising. I was sweating and soaked and just needed to stop.
Near where the trail rises out of the canyon, the wash takes a hard bend to the south. I knew the ascent was near, but didn’t know exactly where. The way I came down was not the actual trail (if a single actual trail even exists). The flooding that had come through over the winter and spring had obscured the trail and I found myself somehow lost.
There was now a large copse of trees on a tall hill between me and the north canyon rim. This was a canyon, it was impossible to actually be lost, yet here I was unsure of where to go. I should have backtracked immediately. I know this now and I knew this then. But instead, I began to climb this tall hill, grasping trees and brush to pull myself up. I cut through dense thickets and lost track of the canyon itself. It was like I was just in the woods somewhere.
Completely disoriented, I threw myself down in frustration and the first stages of panic. I needed to stay calm and I was failing. My throat was throbbing and tongue was swelling. Against my better judgement, I drank a few swallows which helped almost not at all. Now shaking, I stood, weak and uneasy. The world spun and I braced myself against a tree. I had nothing left. This detour had added about a mile to my hike, and I was unsure how I would make it out.
I stumbled forward, cresting this tall hill to a little clearing and the canyon rim came into view. I had never seen anything so insurmountable in all my life. What was actually only two hundred feet seemed like a thousand. To the left were large overhangs which were impossible to climb. To the right, the way was less extreme, and a small cairn was placed atop a large boulder. I had found the trail again.
And lost it just as quickly. The cairn led to nothing, but standing on this boulder, I saw a small path likely carved out by animals. It led me vaguely upward. Taking this path and then leaving it, I began to scramble towards a spot where nothing looked familiar. All around me stood house-size boulders, unscalable, in a palisade arrayed unconquerable. My head ached. My stomach turned.
I climbed, squeezing between the rocks as I could. But I couldn’t and so threw myself down again. Scrambled a few more feet, scratching my way up the cliff only to slide back down, and then rested. And rested again. Each time, I knew I shouldn’t but I drank. And drank again. Never enough to quench any thirst, but enough, I hoped, to keep me alive.
When I say that the canyon walls were only two hundred feet tall, that doesn’t mean the top is only two hundred trail feet away. There is no direct route to the top. There are switchbacks and decisions to be made, paths leading nowhere and, if I was lucky, to the way out.
But which way? I knew where I was and knew where I needed to be, but I was still very lost, unable to find a path to lead me out. The panic returned with the exhaustion. I drank again, now realizing that I was going to run out of water.
As I rested in my confusion, a sharp wind picked up. I looked to the sky and saw storm clouds. The rains, if they came, would not solve my water problem. They would only make the boulders slick and turn the ground to mud, that thick Utah mud. If the rains came, I would not make it out of the canyon.
And I felt defeated. More than that, I was scared. I was terrified. I had never been more terrified in my life. I instantly cursed every decision I had made that day. I closed my eyes, shaking, and just wanted to sleep.
Everything I had been feeling for the past hour or so was clear to me. I was quickly spiraling into heat exhaustion. Knowing this brought on more panic, more terror. I am typically calm in times like this, but there hadn’t been times like this before. I’m an experienced desert hiker. I knew what would come next. But all I could think about was closing my eyes and sleeping. Or barfing. But mostly I longed for sleep.
But I knew better. I knew that if I took a little nap I might not wake up. My body was exhausted. I was mentally half there. I contemplated leaving my pack and doing what I could on my own, but I didn’t. I just couldn’t. Maybe I should have, but I decided that both me and my pack were getting out somehow.
But then, there was this shade. On a day such as this, when the sun beats hot upon white rocks, reflecting back upon you, you cook both sides at once. On a day such as this, the shade is everything. How could I leave this? The rocks under me here were cool to the touch, almost cold. I laid down upon one.
It was here on this wonderfully cool rock, where a small lizard joined me. There had been a multitude of lizards the entire day. I’d walk past one, wave and say, “hello, lizard!” every single time, no matter how beaten I was. But now one was approaching me. What bits of wisdom would this little guy have?
The water was gone now. I drank the last of it while conversing with the lizard sitting next to me, like two old friends who had just sidled up to a bar. Maybe I poured him a cool one and we talked of politics, the weather, just how hot it was, and how much I just wanted to sleep. And maybe he nodded in his knowing way, took the toothpick out of his mouth, and pointed to the path I needed to take.
I thanked him graciously, collected my pack and what passed for all the strength I had left, and rejoined the path. There were still scrambles, there were still slides back down, there was still this aching, scratching thirst with throat swollen and lips cracked dry.
There was no choice left to me: make it out now or die in Bullet Canyon of dehydration and heat exhaustion. Fear of death is a hell of a motivator — but on the bright side, I didn’t have to stop for water anymore.
Somehow (and I truly don’t remember this part of the hike) I scratched and clawed my way to the rim of the canyon. I stumbled sunblind to my car several hundred feet away, opened the doors, and drank the best tasting 150 degree water I ever imagined. I contacted home to allay their worries and finally removed my pack for the last time.
I surveyed my body. I was bloody, with knees and elbows torn, the skin hung from the shins and scratches and gouges strewn across every limb. Sandstone tears at your flesh. The brush clings and thorns puncture, and here I was caked with the blood and dust of Bears Ears. I smiled, not just because I was alive, but because this land taught me a lesson I desperately needed to learn.
At the time, Bears Ears National Monument was in the news as the first Trump administration was planning on dicing and dividing it among various oil and mining companies. This could all be lost, I thought. And writing this now, during the second Trump administration, I can’t imagine anything that will save it apart from far more blood than I spilled in Bears Ears on that day.
Bears Ears is sacred to the Hopi, Dine, Ute, and Zuni people. Their cultures and lives are intricately intertwined with this land. It was a privilege to almost die here. It was, of course, much more of a privilege to live through it.
That evening, I drove to the nearest town and got a motel room. I planned on camping at the trailhead one more night, but I needed a shower and to dress my wounds, and to collect myself.
Looking back now, the photos hardly tell the story at all. And in truth, I am not happy with any of them. The 4x5s are the most successful, but everything else is pretty bad.
What went wrong can be assessed in two ways: the hike itself and photographically. The hike was a bad idea to do in late July. Not just because of the solitude and the heat and the lack of water, but because it limited my time in the canyon to a short day. In the spring, I could do a night or two, or even three, exploring all of Bullet Canyon and the adjoining Sheiks Canyon.
Photographically, I was just inexperienced and packed the wrong film. I should have taken many more photos than I did. I haven’t shot 35mm in years, but if I’d do it now, I’d likely dust off the old Ricoh and shoot several rolls. I would still take the 4x5, but would bring extra sheets and a changing bag to reload along the way. I’d also bring friends.
Experiencing the canyon alone was one of the greatest days of my life. But were I to do this again, a little company would be appreciated.
I’m not getting any younger, and I realize there might not ever be a next time. And if not, that will have to be okay. The photos I took will have to be enough. The memories I have, now written down, will have to suffice.
But sometimes I can still imagine myself overlooking the canyon two hundred feet below me, deepening, falling and twisting west into the late July sunset. I return to my job, my life, my small apartment, check my cameras, check my pack, and I’m always ready to try again.
___________
And that’s it this time around, but it’s also quite a bit. Thank you so much for listening to my little story. If you have any questions about this trip, feel free to contact me. There’s likely some holes in my memory, but I’ll do the best I can.
I have more stories, though probably not as long and dramatic, and I’m sure you’ll hear some of those eventually.
The word “inspiration” originally came to us from French where it meant “to breathe air into.” But in English, it was first used figuratively: to infuse thought or feeling into a person so they could create. It figuratively meant to breathe in creativity. Naturally, with all that creativity in our figurative lungs, we couldn’t help but make art. Literally.
Is this why it feels like we’re suffocating when we can’t find our inspiration? Is this why it feels like we’re dying? Is this why we’re willing to believe and follow almost any advice in some hope to breathe again?
I love the metaphor. Art is life and inspiration is breath. It just feels so perfect and wonderful. But I think it lends itself to b******t. At least, that’s the feeling I get when I read articles or watch YouTube videos about finding your inspiration.
One article I came across on a website aimed at “creative professionals” and photographers specifically was a scattershot list of disconnected ideas that require a lot of inspiration to even work up the motivation to do.
Things like: “Experiment with Different Genres” and “Do Something Differently” and “Do a Personal Project.” They all seem like they were written by someone who forgot what “inspiration” was.
The videos I’ve come across are all nearly identical and pretty useless if you’re suffering from whatever we call the photographer’s version of writer's block. They seem to blame it on impostor syndrome — the feeling that you’re just not good enough — and their advice is “try a bunch of different genres” which they then list. And then the video ends.
But I don’t think lists are a cure here. I don’t think we can rattle off advice like “Find Inspiration in Nature” and be done with it. I think it’s lazy and useless.
There’s one bit of advice that drives me insane, and this could absolutely be my bias showing, but it’s “buy more gear.” I cannot stress this enough - it’s not your gear. A new lens is not going to reignite your lost inspiration. If one does, you didn’t lack inspiration, you lacked drive or were just bored and that’s not the same thing.
Much of the other advice seems to be grasping at straws just to have something to talk about. “Shoot a specific color,” one reads. “Try a new focal length,” attempts another. I suppose they mean well, but have they ever talked to someone actually suffering from lack of inspiration?
They probably think they have. And that’s because as soon as we feel ourselves take a pause, we assume we’re losing something. We really aren’t, we’re just breathing in. It’s not even a rest. And that’s why these throw-away bits of advice seem to work: they’re not for people actually lacking inspiration. They’re written for people generally new to photography and uncertain what to photograph next. And that’s okay, but it’s not what we’re talking about.
I really hate to say this because it sounds dickish and pompous, but I think there are two kinds of photographers (at least). One whose primary focus is usually upon photography, and the other whose primary focus is usually upon collecting cameras. There is some crossover, of course, it’s sort of a spectrum, but I think this sums it up. And both are equally fine. There’s nothing wrong with treating photography as an art just as there’s nothing wrong with collecting cameras.
When it comes to inspiration and being desperate for it, the lack of it is like gasping for air. This whole metaphor probably applies more to the photographers who lean more towards the art end of photography. It goes with the territory. It’s not a badge of honor or anything to brag about. It is what it is.
Most people whose focus is upon collecting cameras and buying new gear don’t have to think much about inspiration in taking a photo. And that’s okay. That’s not their primary focus. Again, they’re not who we’re talking about.
And to be fair, I have come across some actual useful advice. Some folks say to look at other visual art apart from photography, or at the very least look at photos that look nothing like something you’d normally take. Others say to find other photographers and try to talk it out if you can get around the gear talk. I think finding a few photographers who are also friends can help immensely. I’ll never downplay the good effects of having a community.
A few also suggest “taking a break.” This might seem like s**t advice since you’re obviously already taking a break because literally nothing is inspiring to you, but it really is good advice if you go into it properly.
I take a break every winter. It’s just part of my schedule. I don’t worry about it. I don’t fear that I won’t come back. I don’t really give it much thought anymore. I don’t give it any power over me. I am taking the break on my terms, not out of lack of inspiration, but because I’m stepping back for a time.
I’m still a photographer; I still love photography. I still think about it constantly. But I’m just not doing it right now. Even if it coincides with a lack of inspiration, take your breaks on your terms. Get that rest, that separation. Don’t concern yourself with coming back. And maybe, if you’re brave enough, be okay with never taking another photo. It’s a weird detachment, but if you need to go that far, go that far.
But here’s the thing about inspiration, the thing that the articles and videos won’t mention: I can’t tell you what to do to get inspired. Nobody can. We can throw out ideas and, sure, something might be jogged inside of you, but that inspiration has to come from yourself. I know it’s not what most of us want to hear, but what inspires me to keep going will not be what inspires you to do the same.
Oh, but this doesn’t mean I don’t have my own advice! We’ve come this far, did you really think I was just going to drop you off here? In this economy?
My advice is to question yourself. Why do you want to be a photographer? This isn’t an easy question. Answering “I like photography” isn’t going to cut it. Why do you want to do this?
This is not asking “What do you want to photograph?” or “What do you want to get out of photography?” Those are about the product, about motivation. We’re not talking about that. We’re talking about: why do you even want to be a photographer?The answer might not even be something you can put into words. And to be honest, I’m not sure words are the best way to express this. Think about this. Picture how you’ve worked in the past. Remember setting up shots, remember how you framed and composed something.
I’m not asking you to look at your old work, though that’s often some of the better advice, and feel free to follow that at some point. But that’s not what I’m asking of you right now. Forget about the product, forget about the photos, the books, the zines, the prints, the projects for now. Why do you want to be a photographer?
Why do you want to pick up the camera? What was so deep inside of you that only a camera could find it? Why do you want to be a photographer? Why not a writer? Why not a painter? Why not a musician? What can’t those arts give to you what photography can?
When people come looking for inspiration, I understand that they’re not also looking for an existential crisis. But if inspiration is the air that we breathe in, a lack of it is literally (well, figuratively) existential. It’s not something that can be brushed aside with “buy a new lens” or “try being a street photographer,” it’s far more important than that. It deserves to be treated with all the respect that deeply questioning yourself and your motives entails.
If you are in a creative rut, it’s something you’re going to have to work yourself out of. Nobody can guide you out. We have various influences and muses, and they will come back into this at some point. But first, you need to figure out why you’re even here. You need to figure out why you want to be a photographer.
But is this even enough? No, probably not. And that’s okay. Your inspiration will probably come back. These things come and go now and then. It’s okay now and it will be okay in the future. But you need to be okay with it never coming back. I realize this is a bit tricky if you make a living off of your photography. But then, that’s the hazards of commodifying your art to the degree that you must produce to survive. That’s on you for better or worse.
Still, you need to be prepared for the fate that your art might lie in a different medium, or even several different mediums. Maybe you’re not a photographer anymore. And that’s okay, too. Anything that happens here is okay. Your identity isn’t as a photographer, your identity is you, an artist. You expressed that art through photography and you likely will again. Or maybe you’ll move on. But either way, you are still you. Your thoughts and dreams and creations still matter. That air of inspiration still matters. It will come again, and you will breathe it in, and something beautiful will come out.
Will you still be a photographer? Maybe. Hell, you’re here, so probably. But first, you’ll need to sort this out: Why do you want to be a photographer?
Etymology: Emulsion
To photographers, emulsion is that thin layer of something on top of the film base. It’s a mix of gelatin and photosensitive crystals. In my other life, I’m a screen printer. We also have emulsion. It’s a thick oozy photosensitive liquid we coat on the screens we use for printing.
So does emulsion mean a photosensitive layer? No, it’s got nothing to do with that, both things just kind of the same thing.
That photosensitve mixture was first called “emulsion” in 1840 by John Herschel, an early chemist and photographer. He invented the cyanotype and did extensive experiments with emulsions made of plant matter (he called them phytotypes). He was also the guy who (probably) coined the term “photography.”
While Herschel was the first to use emulsion in a photographic sense, he didn’t invent the term. Emulsion was handed down from Latin ēmulgēre, which was a verb meaning “to milk out.” It would have been used when talking about milking a cow or getting milk from nuts.
In fact, the first known English use of emulsion was in 1612 and was about an “emulsion prepared of almonds.” And for the longest time, that’s what it meant — “A milky liquid obtained by bruising almonds, etc. in water.”
Within a few decades, the definition expanded to include any nut or seed or kernel, but it also took on a metaphorical meaning. In 1658, Dr. John Robinson, whose father kind of started the Pilgrims in England, wrote a long-winded book about Truth called Endoxa. In its fourth damn preface, he wrote, “My wished end is, by gentle concussion, the emulsion of truth.” Meaning the essence of truth. He seems to have been the only one to use it that way.
Anyway, before being used for photographical purposes, the pharmacological definition widened further to “a milky liquid, consisting of water holding in suspension minute particles of oil or resin by the aid of some albuminous or gummy material.”
And Herschel’s use of emulsion won out. Other words like “collodion,” “silver bath,” and “sensitizer” sort of have a photographically similar meanings, but are actually different things requiring different words.
The way we use emulsion now is almost a synonym for brands and lines of film. “What are your favorite emulsions,” someone will inevitably ask me, mostly because asking “what are your favorite films” will start a whole conversation about Akira Kurosawa, which is probably much more enjoyable.
Review: Texas Textures, Vol. Two
For me to connect with a photography book, I have to feel some sort of connection to the photographer. This doesn’t mean we have to be friends (though in this case, we are), and it doesn’t mean that I have to love the photographs (though in this case, I do). But one of the things that can connect me to a book is a sort of kinship. Sometimes that kinship is parasocial — I don’t typically know the photographers, hell, often they’re not even alive.
In the case of Kat Swansey’s Texas Textures Volume Two, that connection comes from how we travel. In her Preface, she writes: “For me, these trips are deeply intimate, I travel alone and rarely let others in on my adventures. These trips are a way for me to make time for myself. To see something new, ponder life’s mysteries, allow myself to escape the hustle and bustle of city life, heal what ails me, or just sit with myself — whatever needs to be done at the time.”
We don’t photograph in the same way. If we visited the same towns (and in this case, we have), our photos would be night and day. But why would I want to look at a book full of photos like those I would have taken?
Many folks who photograph old towns and buildings (and especially signs) spend a lot of energy lamenting the disappearance of these things, like we can somehow restore and preserve everything pre-1960 in perpetuity. Kat, on the other hand, has a reverence for these places, but isn’t trying to bring back some bygone glory days.
It’s not that she’s not sentimental in her photos and writing, the book is filled with it, it’s more that she is presenting her Texas on her terms while also allowing Texas itself to exist as it is.
There are various stories she wrote and placed throughout the book detailing her travels and some of the history of some of the towns she’s sharing with us. This gives it a broader idea and helps place you at her side as she travels.
The photos themselves — over 300 of them taken in 34 towns! — are very matter of fact, color images, showing the age and weariness of these towns. She presents each place like anyone might see it if they’d only look. These are taken from sidewalks and roadsides, each photo accessible and open.
There are almost no people in Kat’s book. And yet, it’s a story of the people told through the town and homes, buildings and storefronts they left behind. She photographs the vacancy remaining with empathy and understanding. She’s not just passing through, these are her places, her towns, and her Texas.
Texas Textures Volume Two is the follow up to Volume One, which she released in 2022. They are very much of a piece. If you have Volume One, getting Volume Two won’t feel redundant. Her shooting style over the few years has evolved in some subtle ways, and this new book is a great step forward. Treat yourself to both.
I cannot recommend this book enough, so do pick it up. You can find copies of it at katswansey.com.
My planning of this area became one of the main focuses of the entire trip. So much so that I wanted to make this an entire project, with a book for the photos and short essays about the history of each town. I’d center it around the railroad (Bob isn’t the only one with an interest in trains; mine dates back to before I can remember) and pick up whatever other history might be lying around.
I selected the towns based on where the railroad was or had been. I simply followed the track on the map and noted each town. I then looked through Bob’s photos for that town (he has shot almost all of them) and then decided if it looked like a place where I could make something happen.
Of course, the thought of plagiarism was bouncing around my head much of the time. What was the point here? What was I doing? But I wasn’t just copying Bob. We see things in different ways. Even if we had shot together, the results would be almost like we photographed separate towns.
I would start in McKenney, Viriginia along the I-85 corridor and move south, zig-zagging through places like Stoney Creek, Capron, and Boykins, before crossing the line into North Carolina for Rich Square, Aulander, Robersonville, Rocky Mount, and Roanoke Rapids. I’d end by trailing off west with Henderson, Oxford, and Roxboro.
The Gear
There are some projects that demand an almost chaotic array of photos, taken with various cameras or lenses, a multitude of styles, and as many different emulsions as possible: color, black & white, and numerous samplings of all of them.
For this project, however, what I wanted was uniformity. Every photo wasn’t to look the same, of course. I’m neither Bernd nor Hilla Becher here to create a typology of small southern railroad towns. But still, I wanted it to all be of a piece.
What I expected from the middle-south in July was heat, humidity, and sunshine. I keep saying I’m moving away from color, but it keeps dragging me back. And so color it was. I had recently received about twenty rolls of Kodak Ektachrome E100S which expired in July of 2002, nearly 23 years ago. I had already used a roll or two, and knew it was good, and knew it was well-behaved in how I develop color.
I develop all of my color film using the ECN-2 process. I make my own kits from raw chemicals. I even sell them and you can buy them, but this isn’t a commercial.
My go-to camera is a Mamiya RB67 with a 90mm lens, one of the early lenses shaped like a bell with less coating than the newer ones. It’s a camera that makes a statement, but it’s also my daily driver. I considered running the film through a 1912 Kodak Brownie box camera, but I thought it would be a better idea to have some sort of control over the exposure. I will never know if this was the right decision. But that’s how projects work.
The Execution
But that’s also not how projects work. Projects change over time, over the course of doing them. When planning, we have to be rigid enough to stick to our project but flexible enough to change and adapt rather than giving up.
I had spent too much time in Pennsylvania, and I knew I would have to cut parts of the trip short, but I wanted to keep the Virginia/North Carolina portions intact. My original plan was to explore a bit of the Blue Ridge Mountain towns, but I cut that to save this.
My first night out of Pennsylvania, I camped at a private campground that I think used to be a KOA. In the west, where I usually travel, camping is often very cheap in National Forest campgrounds or free on BLM or other federal land. The East Coast is different, but I knew that going into this. The campground was expensive in comparison, and I’d have to get a hotel room or two before all this was out. This might be my most expensive photography project to date (those hotel rooms add up quick).
After setting up the tent, I headed out for some evening shots of Dewitt, McKenney, and Wesson. I was already off the original plan. In each town, I’d park and just walk around. I had noted a few landmarks here and there to draw my attention, but mostly I just wanted to see what the towns had to offer. It was a Sunday night, and every town, even the busy ones, was empty.
On Baker Street in Emporia – a town that wasn’t in my original planning – I found a colorful row of boarded-up storefronts that once were an extension of their still-busy downtown.
With each photograph I took, I was trying to think forward and back, “would this shot work with the others I’ve already taken?” It’s a question that’s fairly unnecessary to a project, but I find myself editing on the fly, and it feels right for me, so I usually go with it.
The sun was near setting, so I returned to my car, and then to my tent, and then to sleep.
The next day was the biggest. Like any day I travel, every minute of light is a minute when I’m working. I rarely take breaks, and often have to force myself to stop for lunch. I did not eat lunch this day.
I collected a few shots in a few towns early, but nothing really seemed to be working at first. I couldn’t find my place in the day, and was getting a little worried.
On my list was the Nat Turner memorial. There was nothing to photograph here, but I just wanted to see it. In 1831, Nat Turner led a slave revolt that scared the hell out of the country. It lasted for four days before being put down by the military. When I drove to the spot of the memorial, I found nothing at all. With a sigh, I moved on, crossing into North Carolina.
In Conway, I found small cottages along Church Street. There was a story here, but I couldn’t tell what it was. Were these repurposed company houses built by the railroad? Whatever the history, the morning light was beautiful upon them.
I drove, walked, and photographed my way through these towns as the sun rose towards midday and a more uniform light fell over everything.
It was mid-morning when I entered the town of Ahoskie. A quick drive through downtown showed me a thousand possible photos. I parked and spent an hour walking up and down its streets.
In some ways, I am an explorer, but I rarely take my time to truly explore a town. I rely on happenstance and planning. I don’t dig as much as I should, as much as I would like to. But here I did.
The downtown is not dead, but it has consolidated, leaving many vacant storefronts standing. It was Monday morning, and many of the shops that were still open were still closed for the weekend.
But in the window of an old storefront that was now being used as a nondenominational church, I framed the reflection of an old appliance store across the street. “Color / Zenith / Color” read the sign, not fully faded in the lifetime of sunlight it’s endured. I shot the store straight on as well. The light was wonderful.
I took a similar walk through Williamston, framing a shot of a former service station still holding to its foundation next to a 70s looking Wells Fargo building.
Nearby, in Robersonville, the town was built around the railroad, with the track splitting what was once the main thoroughfare. There, I found an aging funeral home, a barber shop that hadn’t seen a customer since the 80s, former banks and ministries. As in the other towns, they weren’t dead, but compressed. I have seen enough small towns to know that these were still very much alive.
But there was something markedly different about them. It wasn’t that something was off or I felt unwelcomed – I knew all too well what that was like; some of the towns in the west and even midwest almost encourage you not to stop. This was welcoming and friendly. There was a lived-in warmth here. But there was also a story in these towns that I just wasn’t getting.
I photographed a few more and found a hotel in Tarboro, but didn’t explore the town. After a bit of a rest, I did a late afternoon run into Rocky Mount, the hometown of jazz pianist Thelonius Monk. There was a mural of him that I wanted to see and photograph, but I had no idea where it was. This would give me a chance to explore the town on foot.
Between Hill Street and Nash, I walked Church Street, Howard, and Main, plowing my way through two rolls. I wasn’t running low on film, but the entire time, my hard limit of “twenty or so” rolls was stuck in my mind. Because of this, I turned down uncertain shots almost everywhere I went, assuming that nothing could be made out of them later.
I finally found the Monk mutual and took three or four shots of it. Photographing a mural is weird. I wanted to incorporate it into a larger context but didn’t want to lose the details. I shot low and grabbed some of the parking lot as foreground.
That night, after returning to the hotel, I examined the day. The story I wanted to tell, that of an area built upon railroads until abandoned, wasn’t there. I mean, it was, that story was there. But that’s not the story of the towns today. I started to try to figure out how to put it together.
As I walked the streets of these towns, I realized that I was the minority here. These are almost exclusively black towns. The businesses are black-owned, and the customers are mostly black, especially in the smaller towns.
There was a story here, to be sure. But this white guy passing through essentially as a tourist isn’t the person who could tell it.
As a person of privilege – a straight white guy – I can often tell whatever story I want about whichever people I choose, and nobody raises an eyebrow. It’s normal for people like me to do whatever the hell we want.
But here, the true reason why it’s not my story was perfectly clear to see. It wasn’t some theory in a classroom, some warning in a book. This wasn’t my story because I knew nothing of its origin, nothing of how this came to be. I knew nothing of their lives, nothing of their history. And in the short amount of time I had to spend in these towns, a quick Google search and a Wikipedia article or two wasn’t going to suffice. This wasn’t my story because the actual story deserved so much better than me.
I lay in bed and breathed a hearty “well f**k, what do I do now?” I didn’t end the project there. Maybe I should have.
The next day, I hit a few towns in the morning, enjoyed the lovely light, photographed a roll or two, and then continued west towards Kentucky and the rest of my trip. My air conditioning went out the previous day, and my nausea had been in various states of intensity. I was exhausted and had thousands of miles to go. But this project, or whatever it was now, was finished.
Now Home
And 3,000 miles later, I was home. Between recovering from the trip and work, I developed the 50 or 60 rolls of black & white and color film. I developed the hundred or so sheets of x-ray film I used to photograph the hundred or so cemeteries I explored on the drive back. I developed everything except the twenty rolls of Kodak Ektachrome E100S, which expired in July of 2002, now a little over 23 years ago.
I sat on these rolls, turning over the story and the project in my mind. August went by. September and October, too. I talked to a few friends and photographers about this project and how I couldn’t see a way through. Some folks suggested having writers from that area tell the story. It’s a great idea, but far beyond anything I could put together for a book that (let’s face it) will only sell 50 or 60 copies at best.
And that’s another aspect of it I considered while not developing the rolls. Who was this for? But then, who is any project for? Ask any photographer, any artist, why they’re doing a project, and they might give you some pretty words wrapped up in an artist statement, but in the end, the project exists because they want it to. There’s nothing wrong with that. We create for a nearly endless volume of reasons, but in the end, it’s because we enjoy it – or at least we don’t hate it enough to not do it.
November went by. Then December. Developing all these rolls over the holidays would be pretty pointless, and I still had no idea what to do with them. And so, the rolls languished in my fridge.
The more I thought about it, struggled with it, tried to ignore it, the more I resigned myself to the idea that nothing would come of it. I’d develop the photos sometime (or not), share a few, and then move on with my life.
Resolving to do nothing actually freed up my brain to do something. But then January slipped away. It had been months since I developed the last photos of my trip. Because I was in various stages of sickness through most of the autumn and winter, I shot nothing over that time. If I opened the fridge, the rolls were there, in a plastic bag, waiting.
February was half a year since my trip. The film was half a year more expired. At this point, I wasn’t sure there would even be much left of the latent images to develop.
The Photos
As I mentioned, I develop my color film using my ECN-2 kits. Most color film uses the C-41 process. ECN-2 is somewhat similar to that, but it is for color motion picture film. Kodak Ektachrome is slide film, requiring the E-6 process to make them slides, transparencies.
I develop all my color in ECN-2 because, for me, it’s cheaper. But also, I like what these chemicals do for the color film I use more often: expired. It cuts fog and boosts contrast and saturation. It also kills a lot of color shifting that can happen over time. I don’t know how it does it, and I don’t really care.
When it comes to slide film like Ektachrome, it can be a mixed bag. Slide film can be finicky when it comes to exposure. Regular color film has a very wide latitude, a huge tolerance. You can over or underexpose by quite a bit in either direction, and you’ll still get a very lovely photo. This is not true with slide film.
I developed my first roll of the Virginia/North Carolina photos in early February. When I pulled the roll out of the tank, I found that the photos were dull, poorly exposed and/or damaged from the heat or the effects of time. Almost nothing would be usable. And, if these effects were true for the rest of the rolls, I’d come away with nothing. But that was okay with me since it made the project decision much easier. No photos = no photo problems. It wouldn’t matter if it wasn’t my story to tell if there were no photos with which to even attempt a telling.
Still, I had to keep going. I developed a few more rolls, and these were surprisingly vibrant. There was some good stuff here. A few more, and I realized that the first roll’s blandness was an outlier. I might have something here after all.
But then could I? Even if every single photo on every single roll was perfect, what did I have? What could I do with it?
I shared a few on social media and got a better response that I thought that I would. Even the algorithm seemed to like them. But I was still uneasy. I knew the photos looked fine, but there was something else I noticed.
Once all of the rolls were developed and I could look at all the photos in one place, I realized that I failed to capture a story. Obviously I couldn’t capture or tell the story of the people who live in these towns. But I couldn’t even tell the story of my travels through them. Everything was jumbled.
I was keeping track of the rolls as I shot them through a numbering and lettering system, and at some point along the way, I lost track. I could piece them together (and have), but even then, there wasn’t some sort of narrative I could follow. And what would I say? If I couldn’t tell the history, what was there to tell?
With all of the photos in one place I looked and realized that there is no story here. There are photos and there are some good ones, but there’s no narrative. There is, however, a nice book. These places are beautiful little towns. Even in their closed businesses and abandoned downtowns, there’s a beauty that needs to be shared.
The story is in the towns themselves, and maybe that can’t be seen or even told outside of the area. But the beauty can, to the best of my abilities, be shown.
The Book
What I mean when I say “it’s not my story to tell” is that I would be the wrong translator to tell it. Nearing the end of the project is not when you hope to decide its fate, but sometimes you have to be willing to take the chance, see a project through to the end to even see if there’s anything there.
With a photography project, where we’ve gone through the process of taking hundreds of photos of scenes we may never be privy to again, we have to work with what we’ve got. If it’s nothing, then it’s nothing, and we move on. But here, there was something.
Sometimes, we can piece together a story of some kind using only the photos. We are creatures of narrative. We have related stories probably since before we evolved into homo sapiens. And we’ve likely been making up stories for nearly as long.
While the original story idea is gone from my book, there is a book (otherwise, I wouldn’t be talking about this). And in a way, it’s a work of fiction. These places all obviously exist. I’ve doctored no photo in any untruthful way. But the manner in which they’re placed together isn’t how they exist in the factual world. There is a truth to this book, but there are no facts here.
A local photographer with ties to the towns could produce something more impactful, could tell the story. But I’m just me. The story I could tell of it would make no sense at all. It would not only not be factual, but it would also not be truthful.
The book I produced is called Outsider. It’s not because I was made to feel like an outsider in these towns. Everyone I met was warm and welcoming. There’s a part of me much larger than I want to deal with who would love to live in these towns, among their residents. I was never made to feel like I shouldn’t be there. But I was an Outsider. It’s not a bad thing, it’s just the truth.
I laid out the book in a couple of afternoons. I don’t enjoy mulling over the placement of every single photo, spreading out prints on the floor and pretending all that matters to such a degree. Or maybe it just comes naturally to me. I create a book or a zine in a burst or two of sessions.
For this book, Outsider, I used full, uncropped photos on the right side. For the left, I selected details of other photos, focusing on the intricate rather than the overview. This allowed me to see things in the photos that I often didn’t notice when I was taking them.
It allowed me to work with juxtaposition, playing one photo off another, creating a bit of conflict or kinship where it would otherwise not be. I suppose this is the fictional part of the book.
The photos are not placed in anything resembling chronological order. It’s not that kind of book. This is a collection for you to take in and enjoy or not. It is not to tell you a story, at least not a coherent one. If you find a story here yourself, I won’t begrudge you.
If you’re interested in buying the book, I have made it as inexpensive as possible. It is a small book, roughly 5” x 6” and 100 pages. All color. If you have seen a copy of my previous book Fall Silent, it is the same size.
But the real story is not in the book, but in the towns themselves, and if you ever find yourself on the border of Virginia and North Carolina, I urge you to get off the interstate and uncover this for yourself.
Maybe you’ve come across a photo by Imogen Cunningham or Diane Arbus or Alfred Steiglitz or anybody, really, and, while you liked the photo, placing it within a larger context of their lives or even history in general is difficult. Often a date will accompany it, but that means almost nothing to us.
We might be able to understand this better when thinking about music. There are bands, like Parliament/Funkadelic, XTC, Springsteen, or Zappa, whose discographies are massive and their songs seem to exist, like the photos of Ansel Adams, apart from time.
You might have heard a few Sinatra songs, maybe “Come Fly With Me” or “My Way” and wanted to hear more, so you listened to one of the many Greatest Hits albums. But even that, like most photographic coffee table books, gives you a fine overview, but fails to place the songs into the context of Sinatra’s discography, his career, his life, and our larger history.
I’ve done this with a bunch of bands as well. I mentioned my friend Brad in the last episode. One day, he dropped an XTC CD in my hand - Apple Venus Vol. 1. I listened to it and loved it, but didn’t really understand how a band could get to this odd point. So I started at the beginning, listening to their first album, their second, third, fourth, their entire discography through to their final album. It was wonderful to listen to a band create and change and reinvent themselves over and over.
This is absolutely applicable to photographers. Seeing what an artist first creates shows us where they’re coming from. Seeing how they change, shows us how their lives and influences have affected their work.
And I do think this matters. Maybe not to the general fan of photography, but to a photographer working on their own pieces, trying to find their voice, trying to keep going, it matters.
We never look at dates on photos unless the photos are documentary in nature. We just see a photo and it exists. Maybe it always existed. We don't know which came first or what came second. We don't know what came before or what came after. We might enjoy the photos, but knowing the context helps us understand the artist.
Understanding a photographer’s full body of work, its chronology, and (to maybe a lesser extent) the photographer’s biography, helps us, as photographers, put our own work in the larger light of our lives.
But I also think there’s a better reason to understand this context. Many photographers, from Adams to Cunningham, Sally Mann to Dorothea Lange, seem like gods to us. There is a sort of pantheon of photographers who seem above us, beyond us, untouchable.
Humanizing the popular photographers we like might go a long way towards this killing, essentially killing the idol part of our idols. Tearing down that pantheon, erasing the line between the greats and ourselves.
Because, of course, they were humans just like us. They were photographers just like us. They had some beautiful moments, and some crashing disasters, just like us. They were obviously good at their craft, but so are we. The line separating us from them isn’t nearly the wide gulf we often believe it to be. Our work is as important as theirs. To ourselves, our own work should be (and is) more important.
Learning about the photographers we like humanizes them. If we stop seeing them as celebrities, as famous people apart from us, it allows them to become more human, and their work more relatable. Seeing their most popular photos alongside their mostly-ignored photos helps us understand our own hits and misses. Seeing their journey helps us understand our own.
When we get into slumps we can see that these other artists have too. We know our own chronology. We know the s**t that we produced early on. We know the successes, the beginner's luck, the bad rolls, bad shots, and general f**k ups. We often allow our own mistakes to define us, control us. But all the photographers we admire went through that too. Maybe their f**k ups are lost to antiquity, but they existed. They were there.
There’s one event in my life that solidified this belief for me. You might remember the name Evelyn Cameron from my previous podcast. She was a photographer who worked in Montana in the late 1800s and early 1900s. She photographed the local landscapes and the ranch life of eastern Montana. I don’t remember how I got into her, but I had a book that told a brief sketch of her life and then a random scattering of her photos.
The next summer, I traveled to Terry, Montana, where there are two museums and galleries dedicated to her. I visited the galleries and saw prints she made herself, some of her clothing (including her famous pith helmet) and had a wonderful time.
The main county history museum, located in an old bank, has almost nothing of Cameron in it. Except, in the vault are contact prints made directly from all 700 or so of her glass plates. They were cataloged and kept in binders (the actual plates, along with her Graflex camera named Lexie, are in the state museum in Helena).
The person watching the museum allowed me to spend as long as I wanted with these contact prints, all 5x7 printed on 8x10 paper (I think I’m remembering this correctly).
The photos contained in the book I had and galleries I visited total maybe 100 or so. It’s a small fraction of her archive. But now, that entire archive was right there before me.
This was my first trip shooting 4x5. It was the same trip as the Utah Canyon mishap (one hell of a trip, right?). So I was making a slew of rookie mistakes all over the place. I was forgetting to close the shutter after focusing, I had light leaks from bad holders, I missed focus, had bad composition.
And as I leafed through Evelyn’s archive, I saw these same mistakes. She had some bad holders too. She overexposed sometimes, she missed focus, sometimes her composition was off and she retook the photo. I recognized the same developing mishaps that I was making too.
Suddenly, this amazing photographer, this artist who I had placed on an untouchable pedestal, was human. She was still a brilliant photographer, but she also fucked up a lot, just like I did. And she wasn’t doing this only at the beginning of her work. All throughout, she made mistakes, just like we still do.
If someone would have asked me before seeing her archive if I thought Cameron was some untouchable idol, I would have said no, of course. Intellectually I knew she was a fallible human. But knowing something intellectually and seeing the evidence of it right there before you are two different things. That day, I actually realized that the photographers we look up to are less up and more by our sides than we tend to believe.
That day, I killed my idol. But I also drew closer to her. I saw something of her work that so few have seen. I went from really liking the photography of Evelyn Cameron to falling in love with her work, the town she called home, and the landscapes she photographed.
And I realize this experience is rare. We are almost never afforded this opportunity. But with some of the more popular photographers, archives are available, and if we can, we should arrange to visit them.
In most other cases, we might have to do some digging and some used book buying. We might have to read some biographies and begin making a sort of archive ourselves, noting the chronology of their popular photos and digging deeper to find less famous shots (or even mistakes) to place around them.
This is a daunting task and a pain in the ass. But in quite a few cases, there are retrospectives and anthologies that are arranged chronologically with hefty bios for introductions. These bios usually reference and contextualize the photos, essentially doing our work for us. All we have to do is look.
Unfortunately, a lot of books, even anthologies, don’t put the photos in chronological order. There’s an amazing and huge Anne Brigman book that is one of my favorites to just flip through, but the photos have no relation to her chronology. Fortunately, there’s another book, not nearly as well produced, that does this.
I realize this seems sort of nerdy, much more academic than artistic. And it is. But it also helps us understand our own work. And if we really wanted to get academic about it, we could also look at their influences. We do this in music. I listen to a lot of Sinatra, and recently learned that one of his biggest influences was Billie Holiday. So now when I listen to Miss Day, I listen for the bits that Sinatra brought forward.
And I’m definitely not saying we need to do this for every photographer we enjoy. But it really is beneficial to try this with at least one you already know pretty well. Find a biography and start matching up photos to points in their lives. Try to find one with a long career, maybe one with different phases or periods. If you get really lucky, there will be entire books published about their specific periods, like Lee Miller’s surrealist phase or Edward Weston’s early years or Man Ray’s Paris years. It’s likely the authors will have contextualized this part of their work for you. You get to learn and hardly break a sweat.
Studying and reading the biographies of photographers really isn’t about learning what they did in their lives. Sure, their antics can be a fun context (especially someone like Margeth Mather), but really it’s about learning when and, more importantly, why they took the photos they did.
It’s not that I don’t care about their lives and their exploits, but mostly I just want to know how their lives influenced and affected their work.
Then we can look at our own lives and compare similar situations and see how those situations have affected our own work. Maybe we’ll notice things in our photos that we didn’t see before. Maybe we’ll see our own work in a different light.
Learning all we can about our favorite photographers demystifies them, it returns them to our level, to reality. These photographers existed, like that a*****e Morrisey sings in “Cemetery Gates,”with loves and hates and passions just like mine. They were born, and then they lived, and then they died.”
There’s more to their lives, of course, just as there’s more to ours, but to put it plainly, they’re just people. They’re just like us. We’ve made them idols in our minds, and that notion should be killed. But we don’t kill our idols by boycotting the photographers we love. We do it by humanizing them, drawing connections from their lives to ours, by seeing their mistakes, their early work, their middle work.
We do this by putting their photos and their lives into a larger context. We do this by killing the idols we’ve made them to be and celebrating the beautifully flawed humans that they were.
Now it’s time for the second segment which is only very tangentially related to the first segment. Okay, here we go…
Crazy Kid Stuff
As photographers, we get asked a lot of questions from other photographers. From “what lens do you use?” to “what’s your favorite emulsion?” When we share a photo, the questions are almost never about the subject or photo itself, but the equipment we used to take that photo.
Today I was reading 3 Shades of Blue by James Kaplan, which is about the recording and history of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue album. In it, Kaplan related a story about when John Coltrane (who played on the album) and a friend and fellow sax player, Benny Golson, met one of their idols, Charlie “Bird” Parker.
On a June night in 1945, John Coltrane and Benny Golson went to a Dizzy Gillespie/Charlie Parker show at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. This was their first time seeing Charlie Parker and each had a different reaction. Though Coltrane played it cool, Benny, as he explains here, did not:
“After that concert was over, we went backstage, like kids do, and got everybody’s autograph. It was an evening concert and Charlie Parker was going over for the first show at a place called the Downbeat. And so John and I were walking up Broad Street with him, and John was saying,‘Can I carry your horn for you, Mr. Parker?’
“I’m on the other side saying ‘What kind of mouthpiece do you use? What kind of reed do you use? What strength reed do you use? What is the make of your horn?’ This crazy kid stuff, and he was telling it all and I thought I was getting the real lowdown.”
These questions are crazy kid stuff. In a very real way, it’s not that important. Just like asking what filters and film and even cameras photographers use isn’t important. The art of it all is the important thing.
But that’s difficult to talk about. What isn’t difficult to talk about are lenses, developers, specific chemicals in developers. All of that is easy and casual conversation. It’s mundane and broadly unimportant, but I get it.
And I do get it. I get these questions all the time. This is the reason why I share which camera, film, settings, lens, and developer I use. Because when I didn’t, I got asked that over and over. I’d always be cool and never really minded, but now many of the questions are answered before they’re asked.
Except I get other questions now – “which filter are you using? Which version of the RB67 do you have? Are you scanning your negatives or using a dslr?”
I’m still cool about these questions. Any of them, really. But I do lean more on the side of their unimportance. They are, as Benny said, crazy kid stuff. They’re the things you think to ask when you don’t know what else to say. When you just want some sort of conversation with a photographer (etc.).
I’ve been on both sides of this. When I was just getting into photography and trying to figure it all out, I’d ask these crazy kid questions too. I was often ignored or told it didn’t matter, which is a real dick thing to do. So now that I’m on the receiving end of these questions, I’m more than happy to answer them, just like Charlie Parker was more than happy to rattle off the answers to Benny’s questions.
But really, the answers don’t matter at all. If I use a deep yellow filter instead of a regular yellow or red, it doesn’t matter. If I prefer the RB67 Pro S over the Pro or Pro-SD, it doesn’t change a thing. If you found out that I like the original uncoated lenses over the C or K/L versions, your life should be no different than before. That is crazy kid s**t.
Until it’s not. When the questions turn from what to why, that’s when things get interesting. If Benny asked Bird “Why did you change from a Tonalin reed to an Ebolin?” then it would be a conversation. But Benny wasn’t there yet. He wouldn’t have known what to do with the answer, let alone think of the question.
Beginning photographers are like that too. They don’t have the experience to ask the important questions. And that’s okay. As experienced photographers, we need to make sure we’re being cool with the new ones. We need to answer those crazy kid questions and nudge them onto something more important.
New photographers need to learn that even with the exact same camera, lens, film, developer, and scanning method, they’re not going to take the same photos an experienced photographer might. They need to learn to build their own style. And I think these crazy kid questions can be part of that.
What’s likely happening is that they see something in a photo that sparks something in them. Maybe they want to emulate that to an extent, but what should be encouraged in them riffing on that idea. They need to be encouraged to take that equipment or technique and make it their own.
And when they make it their own, when they find their style, their place, they’ll get these crazy kid questions too. And hopefully, because we were cool to them, they’ll be cool to the next batch.
My point is that we have a lot of cameras and for the collectors, that’s a good thing. That’s the point of collecting. But for the photographer, I think it’s a bad idea.
I’m not saying it’s a bad idea to own however many cameras you can stomach owning. Collect all the cameras you want. What I’m saying is that I think if we’re going to get serious about photography, we need to focus on a single camera.
Why Just One?
“Let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in Walden, “instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail... Simplify, simplify.” Of course, he wrote Walden while living rent free on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s land, with Emerson’s wife cooking his meals, and his own mom doing his laundry. But still, it’s not bad advice.
Simplifying our lives seems daunting. There’s no simple way to do it, which is somewhat ironic. So why not start with photography? Simplify, simplify by weeding out the cameras we no longer use, no longer like, no longer want. Simply further by selecting the one camera that motivates us, inspires us to create.
If you’re going on a trip or a hike, take a single damn camera. Stop taking six or ten or however many cameras with you. Absolutely nobody is impressed and it’s just confusing.
Picking just one camera allows us to become experts with that camera. I don’t mean just your make and model, I mean the specific camera you hold in your hand. These cameras aren’t new. Each has their own unique tricks and quirks. Maybe the shutter is a bit slow or the film advances oddly. Maybe the focus is a bit off or there's just something weird about it. The film counter on my Mamiya 645 doesn’t flip back to zero when I’m done with a roll. I have to manually turn the gear inside the film compartment backwards each time. Whatever it is, the more you use it, the more you will become an expert at using your camera.
On the practical side, using just one camera saves us money. Granted, it’s money we’ll just end up spending on film and developing, but still. We’ll no longer feel the need to browse Ebay for our next camera. We’ll not bother with antique stores or swap meets. Yard sales will have even less appeal to us.
More than anything, however, I’ve found that settling upon a single camera also eliminates that weird drive for more gear - what some folks call GAS, gear acquisition syndrome. Eventually, that drive to get another lens, another body, and yet another lens will just go away. That urge to spend your money on some random camera will be replaced with the urge to photograph, to actually use the camera you already have.
I recently wrote about the various bad advice we photographers are given when we’re looking for inspiration. My least favorite of all was the idea that buying a new piece of gear will inspire you. It’s b******t. First, that’s not inspiration. Second, we need to learn how to find that inspiration within ourselves, with our own cameras. This is why picking the right camera for you is so important.
Picking Favorites
I have a horrible time at picking a favorite anything. If someone asks me what my favorite movie is, I don’t even know how to begin the selection process. A favorite song? Do you mean now? Yesterday? Last year? I can’t wrap my head around how people even have such a thing as a favorite.
So picking a favorite camera should be just as daunting. Except that’s not really the same thing, is it? You had nothing to do with your favorite movie or favorite song. You weren’t involved in the creation of either. They came to you, perfectly formed and in their final product. In fact, they are products and you are the consumer.
It’s not quite the same as having a favorite camera. With a camera, you are not the consumer (at least, not after you bought it). You are the producer, the artist, the creator. The relationship we have with the instruments used to create our work is a different relationship than we have towards almost anything else.
But we do still have to pick a favorite, and even with cameras, I’m really bad at it. Narrowing down our collections is not an easy thing to do. Simplifying isn’t necessarily simple. But I do have a few tips.
First, take a look at your work, especially the pieces that you’re especially proud of. Don’t look up or try to remember which camera and lens you used to take the photos. Just go by instinct and select a few dozen that really move you. With them all together there staring you in the face, sort them by camera. Which one allowed you to take your favorite photos?
Of course, it’s probably not going to be that simple. So maybe start with remembering how each camera made you feel. Which was the most fun to use? Which brought you the most happiness? Which camera, when you see it, makes you smile?
And then there’s the practical reasons to keep a camera. Maybe if you really like hiking, a 35mm is a good choice. What is the best camera to use for the work you normally produce?
In the end, there’s no formula for this, and you might make the wrong decision. In one way, the gear we have doesn’t matter. We tell ourselves that “any camera is able to take a wonderful photo in the right hands.” And this isn’t necessarily untrue, but we’re looking for the perfect camera for us. The one that makes you feel like a damn photographer.
Obviously There Are Exceptions
Here’s where I break in and tell you that I do not shoot with a single camera. I have a good excuse for this, too, though it’s more of a justification than anything. I shoot two formats: large and medium, 4x5 and 120. I have one daily driver (so to speak) for each of the formats.
I actually suggest this. If you shoot 35mm and 120, then I don’t see any reason to force yourself into picking a single format. I want us to simply, not go crazy. Each format offers things that other formats can’t. Whether it’s the portability of 35 or the scope of 4x5 or 8x10, each format allows us to photograph the same subject in wildly different ways.
That said, try not to use that as a justification to just collect more cameras. Remember, we are simplifying, not collecting.
What About Lenses?
One of my least favorite things to talk about (or to listen to others talk about) is lenses. I realize and understand that they’re all not the same, and that each lens has a variety of different and important attributes. But all talk about lenses is the same, and it’s all unfathomably boring. Especially when compared to actually using a lens.
So here is my very short spiel about lenses: pick a few you like and get rid of the rest. You don’t have to explain why you like them (and it’s better for everyone if you don’t). And you don’t even have to understand why you made the selections you did. Just do it and get on with your life.
We have now reached the end of my lens talk.
What Do I Do With All These Cameras?
But what do we do with all our cameras; with the dozens we’ve collected over the years? Hell, some we’ve probably never even shot. To put it plainly, I don’t know. I don’t have an answer for this. I still own dozens and dozens of cameras. I haven’t shot 35mm in years, yet I’ve got more of those than anything else. Why? I don’t know. I have no answers here.
My point isn’t to get rid of the cameras you have (though we probably should). It’s not about owning stuff or not owning stuff. It’s about creating our work, improving our skills and our desires to produce. I feel it’s easier to do that with a single camera.
And I know that doesn’t answer the question. In my case, who the hell would want some Exaktas that basically work? What about my weird ass box cameras? And that Mamiya 645 with the broken counter; I couldn’t force that upon someone, it’s a ridiculous thing to deal with.
But then, every camera has its quirks. Maybe it would click with someone. So if you feel weird about selling off most of your collection, why not share it? Loan them out! Give them away if you like. There are literally no rules here.
Like I said, you don’t need to get rid of a single camera. You can keep your entire collection. But try to settle on one camera to use regularly.
I’ll Shut Up Now
And that’s my plea. Why do I care? I guess I really don’t. Do what you want, it’s your photographic experience. But if you’re looking to take a different approach to your photography, if you’ve decided to get serious about your work, maybe consider narrowing it down. You only need one camera to be a photographer.
Of Tolkien, Sea-Longing, and a New Photography Project
I have a friend, and we’ve known each other for something like 25 years now. I worked in a bookstore on the east coast and he was one of my customers. In fact, the first thing he ever said to me was: “Who’s the a*****e on the Segway?” as some a*****e on a Segway scooter rode past the door. It was love at first sight, really.
We bonded over a shared love of Star Wars. He introduced me to some amazing music like XTC, and tried to get me interested in Tolkien, but I declined.
If you’re wondering whether someone has ever actually said, “You know, the Silmarillian is my favorite Tolkien book,” I promise you, it was Brad who said this. And I was like, “sorry buddy, no can do.”
He really wanted me to get into Tolkien though. So before the Return of the King premiered at midnight on December 17, 2003, he brought over the DVDs of Fellowship and Two Towers and we watched them back-to-back before heading to the theater. But I still wasn’t hooked. I mean, I liked the movies, but not enough to actually read the books.
We hung out almost every day for a couple of years, and then he moved away. We kept in touch as best we could, but it wasn’t the same. He moved to Wisconsin, and then to Canada. I moved to Seattle, after which, he moved to around Portland. Each year since then we spend Christmas together and I stop in at his place at the end of my month long photography trips.
In that time, I discovered Tolkien. I read the Hobbit, read Lord of the Rings, and then the Silmarillion. And then I took it too far. I delved into the History of Middle-Earth, a 12-volume series tracing the earliest writings all through to the very last thing Tolkien wrote. This was the various drafts of the Silmarillion and Lord of the Rings, plus a slew of many, many other things.
Brad was obviously thrilled. We had talked about getting together online to just chit chat, but that never really happened. Recently, with the news that he might move again, he asked if I wanted to read some Tolkien and then discuss it together. My answer was “Yes, I absolutely want to do this!”
After some back and forth, we settled on a book called The Fall of Gondolin. The book contains various versions of one of the stories from the Silmarillion. Real nerdy stuff, to be sure. I knew the basic idea of the story, but never actually studied it specifically. We assigned ourselves the first 60 pages and would meet up in a week to talk about it.
This was all happening in the last week or so, and I think it’s a good idea to tell you what I had on my plate, photographically speaking. And that was nothing. Nothing at all. I had no ideas, no projects, nothing new. I was still planning on doing some more cemetery photos, and was working on a hike or two, which would involve a camera, but nothing solid. I had no ideas at all.
And that bothered me. Especially since I had just written that piece on inspiration. I was fine with taking a break, like I said. But also, I wasn’t as fine with it as I wanted to be. I knew that I was supposed to believe that inspiration would just come and hit me at some point. But when? I said I wasn’t getting nervous about it, but also, I was. Well, not exactly nervous. I wasn’t afraid I’d never be inspired again. I think I just really wanted to feel that inspiration.
I’m not going to tell you the story about the Fall of Gondolin, but I do need to tell you a little bit about it.
It’s about a guy, a human, named Tuor. He left the company of other people and walked down a river until it finally reached something neither he, nor any man, had ever seen before: the sea.
“And here for awhile he wandered till he came to the black cliffs by the sea and saw the ocean and its waves for the first time, and at that hour the sun set beyond the rim of the Earth far out to sea, and he stood on the cliff-top with outspread arms, and his heart was filled with a longing very great indeed.”
I should tell you about my history with the ocean. When I was a kid, my parents would take us to various New Jersey beaches and Ocean City, Maryland. We called it “the shore,” and while I knew it was the ocean, I never really connected it to the sea, if that makes any sense. The Sea is wild. The shore is a boardwalk filled with seagulls trying to steal your fries. It smells of tar-soaked wood, sunscreen, and pizza (possibly the best combination of scents known to humankind).
It’s a place filled with tourists baking themselves like potatoes, various teenagers, and innumerable shops where you could buy Motley Crue t-shirts. It wasn’t a place to appreciate nature. There was an ocean, but there was not a sea.
Later in life, I made it to the Pacific Ocean, but that was just the Santa Monica Pier, which was like a shitty mirror image of what Californians thought Jersey beaches were like. Since then, I’ve visited some other West Coast beach towns and even some much more natural beaches. They’re nice, but apart from a quick “ohh, pretty!” I didn’t much care. I knew they were beautiful, but just didn’t get it.
So as I read about Tuor taking in the Sea for the first time, I was a little jealous. I recalled some of the high cliffs overlooking the ocean along Route 101 in Oregon. I remembered a quick trip to Northern California, too. I shrugged it off, and continued reading.
“There long he sojourned alone and roamed about the shore or fared over the rocks at the ebb, marveling at the pools and the great weeds, the dripping caverns and the strange sea-fowl that he saw and came to know; but the rise and fall of the water and the voice of the waves was ever to him the greatest wonder and ever did it seem a new and unimaginable thing.”
Why couldn’t I experience this? I thought as I read. In the deserts, I feel such a direct connection to the land. The prairie winds and waving grasses, in beauty much like the sea, call to me when I’m away. On my hikes and travels into the scablands, I find surreal solidarity with the sage brush and basalt columns. I hold a kinship with the coyotes and rattlesnakes, the magpies and ravens. But why has the sea never placed itself in my heart?
Tolkien writes that Tuor’s heart was “ever egging him with a strange longing” to venture out onto the sea. At times “it grew into a fierce desire.”
I have longed for places in a similar way, and have written quite a bit about that longing. It’s inexplicable, but some places just call to us. We either hear the call or we don’t. It is either calling or it’s not. And maybe there is nothing we can do about the call. But then, maybe there is.
An idea formed now, as I continued reading.
“There [by the sea] he passed a very great while until the loneliness of the empty sea got into his heart…”
Maybe there is nothing we can do about this calling. Maybe the sea calls to some and disregards the rest. Or maybe we can call out ourselves. Nature, perhaps, isn’t unmoved by our own cries.
As photographers, sometimes a project just comes into being after we photograph a variety of things. We find some thread within our work, and with a bit of culling and some imagination, we create a project from pictures already taken.
And sometimes we start with nothing, no photos, no specifics, no real locations, just some words. Some “strange longing” that might not even be in our hearts. Some “strange longing” that might not even be our own, at least not yet.
As photographers, as artists, we have felt that loneliness. It lives in our hearts and sometimes helps us create and sometimes halts all creation. While I have felt and lived the loneliness of the open road, the loneliness of small towns, of the prairie, of canyons, and stark deserts, I have yet to feel the loneliness of the empty sea. I have yet to feel it flowing into my heart, adding its own loneliness to my own.
But here, as I read, formed a new idea, a new project. The first ocean that came to my mind when reading these pages was that of southern Oregon. Far south of the often-over-photographed Canon Beach and the Wreck of the Peter Iredale. Far south of the Columbia and Portland.
And I could go when others wouldn’t – harsh autumn days, swept with rains and fog – long after what few tourists venture there have left.
The practical also came into focus. There were a few campgrounds, which would cut expenses, making the whole thing more feasible, more likely. They would also place me closer to where I could photograph.
I looked at maps and marked dozens of rocky beaches, hidden coves, and trails to jagged overlooks. I counted and lost count, and realized this might not take a trip or two. This might take years.
And what if I couldn’t feel that “strange longing”? What if the sea never called to me? Could I still photograph it? Would that even be honest? Would it be true?
But that is always the case with projects like this. They form themselves as some complete entity in your mind, when in reality they exist not at all. We have to bring them into being. We, as artists, as photographers, have to create these projects or fail trying. There are no guarantees of anything. With our creativity, we are not promised a single photograph. Whatever may be success is not foretoken. This calling and “strange longing” is not assured. I might not know if the loneliness of the empty sea has gotten into my heart until after every photo has been taken.
But I will know nothing at all if I don’t make this attempt, if I don’t seek this out. The sea cannot call out until I am there before it. Nothing can be created until I am willing to create.
I told my friend Brad about this as we discussed Tuor’s journey to the sea. He was happy for me and supportive, even though I must have sounded crazy. We talked of how I would accomplish this and it seemed almost silly, as any creative idea spoken out loud must. Saying the words “I want to photograph the ocean because I want to feel this sea-longing” is, by any standard, a ridiculous statement.
But here is my project. It’s now as formed as it can be prior to any work being done, before any actual creation. I didn’t want this or ask for this. I had no plans whatsoever to even visit the ocean. And yet, there’s obviously some calling and I have little choice but to answer. There is some “strange longing” and before too long we’ll see what kind of loneliness gets into my heart.
The sun rose softly behind thick morning clouds as I crossed the Columbia River on Interstate 90. I had left Seattle hours before dawn and regretted not camping the cold night before. The light was dim and gray, and though I was there to photograph the spring wildflowers, I had brought enough black & white film to last the entire hike should the clouds fail to disperse.
Washington is known for its lush forests of firs and moss, its tall granite peaks, and glacial lakes. But that is almost never my destination. East of all that, on the other side of the Cascade Mountain Range, lies an almost prairie landscape full of sage and grasses intercut with seemingly inexplicable dry box canyons. It’s called the Scablands, and that’s an awful name for one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. This is the shrub-steppe, a (nearly) desert grassland that covers nearly one-third of the state.
While a few trees dot the landscape – mostly the invasive Russian olive tree – the rolling hills are covered with sagebrush, a slow-growing shrub whose leaves smell of camphor and mint. When it rains, the air fills with this scent and everything in the world seems perfect, even though it really, really isn’t.
When I arrived at the trailhead, there were more cars than I had ever seen there before: fifteen. Maybe sixteen. Had my spot been blown up? I wondered, reminding myself that this wasn’t my spot, that I’m only here a few times a year. This is public land, and it’s ours. But still, that’s a lot of cars for a place three hours from Seattle. I parked, double-checked my gear, took a long drink of water, and started down the trail.
The hike was at a place known by a few different names. Most commonly, it’s called Ancient Lakes – a misnomer we’ll come back to. But it’s also called Potholes Coulee, and has been for nearly a century. This is a state wildlife area known as the Quincy Lakes Unit, part of the Columbia Basin Wildlife Area.
The main features, apart from the lakes, are two half-mile wide canyons running parallel, east and west into the Columbia River, for two miles with a thin spine separating them. From space, they look like a giant had pressed two fingers into the mud. The north canyon, Ancient Lakes Coulee, is the most traveled and visited. It’s the easiest to get to and has several small lakes inside it. The south canyon is Dusty Lake Coulee. They are not mirrors of each other, but hikers rarely do both.
But I would do neither this time. Over the years, I have explored and camped in both. I have walked in from the same trailhead, level with the floor of the coulees. And I have also scrambled the 250 feet down the side of the coulees from the top. I have hiked and photographed the overlooks, side canyons, wetlands, and oddities of this place for the last fifteen years.
Though the coulees themselves weren’t where the trail was taking me today, my first stop was a photo I have wanted to retake for years. Nothing was wrong with the original one. Or the one I took after that. But I wanted to see what I could do with it again.
A main trail – actually an old ranch road – leads you across the wide mouths of both coulees, here nearly a mile in width. Along the way, several trails lead you inside the coulees, with various branches splitting off here and there.
I tramped past the first main trail off, and then the second, cresting over the crumbled remains that divided Ancient Lake Coulee from Dusty Lake Coulee. From here, I looked east along the tall spine left standing. These were sheer basalt cliffs with columns like the Devil’s Fence Post or Giant’s Causeway. But they were here, unheralded and unnamed, tucked into the cliffside with some small sunlight piercing the clouds and showing their tall shadows. Looking a mile across to the other side, a small waterfall was lit up white by the sun, and it twinkled and shone. If I had time, I said, I’d visit it on the way out.
I backtracked some, returning to the trail into the coulee. My footprints were the only ones on it that morning, and I tracked over only the faintest of prints left in the mud some weeks before. This was the first warm weekend, more would be coming. But for now, it was just me.
What I was seeking was off-trail a bit, and I began angling away from the trail, moving through grasses, sage, and nearly-opened rock buckwheat flowers, stepping over tumbleweeds of invasive Russian thistle, until I found a century-old iron wheel stuck into the ground. What was left of its spokes was cut so the axle could be freed.
I don’t know what this wheel was attached to or why the wheel was left. I know nothing of it at all, finding it by accident as I roamed around a decade ago.
I slipped off my pack and removed the camera. I circled the scene a few times, deciding how to shoot it this time, forgetting how I shot it last, though maybe that’s for the best. When I reshoot a location, I try my best to forget how I shot it before. But I also want to photograph it differently, and so I try to feel my way into something new. Sometimes it even works.
The light was still dim, and I used 400 speed Ilford HP5 with a yellow filter to bring some small handful of contrast to the scene. Still circling the wheel, I shot several frames, including a close-up of a thistle branch. The sun cooperated by staying hidden, and I continued on, looking for the trail that would lead me lower.
If the coulees had flowing water, it would empty into the Columbia River, running perpendicular just a mile west of the trailhead. The land between the coulees and the river, 500 feet below, is a maze of tall, sharp outcroppings and dead-end narrow basins. Few trails lead down the various precipices, but I had found one that did.
The trail here was a well-cut walkway clinging to the side of a basalt cliff. Over the millennia, the cliff had shed, littering and piling thin rocks along its walls. Eventually, I thought, the cliffs will shed so much they will no longer be cliffs, but hills, steep and rolling. For now, though, walking over this uneven and precarious talus path, the view winding down to the river, still hidden in a canyon of its own, stopped me.
With the sun, still low and again behind clouds, the gray valley unfolded itself. The rocky path I was on descended to a landing lush with grasses and sage. As the cliff I was walking along faded away, another, opposite me, extended with various levels and shelves, themselves covered in grasses, leading to basalt walls and columns hundreds of feet high. Trails branched and combined within this small space.
Above me cried two ravens, flying side-by-side in the cool air. As they floated down into this little valley, towards the Columbia, one of the ravens turned upside down, tucked in their wings, and gave a quick and joyful “caw caw!” before flipping back and gliding with their friend. A moment later, the raven again flipped over, repeating the same call, and then back right. They did this several more times before flying back up the canyon, circling, and gliding back down again. As they escaped my view, I could still hear the upside-down “caw! caw!” echoing off the walls.
This is often seen as a mating ritual or a way to assert dominance, and both of those things might be true. But it’s also fun. Like most birds, ravens and crows fly to find food, to get from one place to another, for survival. But they also fly for fun. Ravens and crows play. I’ll often see my city crows sliding down roofs when it snows.
Taking some time to watch ravens in the wild is endlessly rewarding. They are intelligent, cautious, and shy, so if they see you as an unnecessary threat, they will leave you. But if you have patience and quiet, you can watch them for as long as they allow and your life will be all the better for it.
I didn’t photograph the ravens, I didn’t even try. This was a moment I wanted to experience myself, without the gauze of ground glass. Also, on a practical level, trying to frame and focus anything moving through the waste level finder of a Mamiya RB67 is a confusing, frustrating mess that not only results in no good photograph, but also succeeds in fully removing you from the moment. Part of being a good photographer is knowing when you’re not.
The grassy plain below was not flat like it seemed from above. This is a feature of this land that I will never grow accustomed to. Looking across any open space of sage and grasses reveals what seems to be a featureless flatland. However, when you make the trek across it, you rise and fall with the undulating ripples and hills, invisible just moments before.
I scrambled up some natural steps, between sagebrush and giant boulders left stranded before coming to a landing where the Columbia finally came into view, still hundreds of feet below, as if the river was falling with me.
By now, the sun gave a full view of the yellow and green landscape. The temperatures were rising, and I wanted to steal a small slice of shade before that too slipped away. To my right were the basalt cliffs, still reaching towards the Columbia, and to my left was a small outcrop of rock surrounded by the yellow blossoms of the arrowleaf balsamroot, a small sunflower which grows in bunches a foot and a half tall. Patches of these could be seen on the opposite slopes and shelves, but here was a small patch surrounding the dried skeleton of a sagebrush.
Since I was resting anyway, I went for the camera. With the light still coming and going, I went with a very expired Portra 400, shooting it at 100 and figuring it would all work out. The choice between black & white film and color is often one I struggle with, even when it comes to flowers. But on this day, there was no struggle at all.
The shadow of the formation, the shade whose shelter I was under, covered some of the flowers and part of the old sagebrush, but the rest glinted in their morning splendor, overlooking the grasses below. I took two shots and continued my walk.
Though I should not have been surprised, I lost the river behind a hill growing before me. This was a tall bench overlooking the final drop into the Columbia. With short breaths, I crested it and stopped.
The bench did not lead directly to the river itself, but sloped sharply before flattening out into a flood plain where countless boulders were strewn amidst trails leading to the water. A row of trees, their leaves newly green in the spring, lined the river, and between them, a few hikers had established camps. I could hear voices from below – the first I had heard since the trailhead.
There is a large part of me that hikes and photographs and travels for the solitude. I live in a city, and to visit a popular waterfall or overlook near the city seems ridiculous to me. I come to nature to escape the crowds of the city, not to meet up with them atop some ridge with a view of the entire Seattle metropolitan area. But that morning, the laughter and joy floated up with the breeze, and it somehow seemed fitting.
I could see no people, just a tent or two, but I photographed this view in both color and black & white, unsure which would relate the scene best. Looking at them now, I still don’t know.
The trail winding down to the campsites skirted a large washed-out gulch a few hundred feet wide. Crossing it, I expected to see layers of rock and earth denoting eras and the passing of time. Instead, the inside of this gulch and the inside of this shelf were a mix of cobble and sandy earth. Some of the rocks were basalt, which made sense, but many were of various colors and sizes, most worn smooth and rounded as if tumbled not just by some long-forgotten glacier, but by water.
This is one of the many stories of this land, all too involved to tell. But from here, you could see much of it. The basalt, then as lava, had flowed from fissures in southern Washington and Oregon. Here, it had flowed and then cooled 15 million years ago. During the ice age, 20,000 years ago, glaciers made their way south, coming close to Ancient Lakes, but never quite touching them.
Of course, at that time, there were no coulees and canyons. It was just rolling hills and grasses, much like the Palouse region in the far eastern portion of the state. But then the floods came, perhaps 15,000 years ago. Over and over, water burst from ice dams and from under melting glaciers, flooding all of eastern Washington, tearing away the loose basalt, creating channels and canyons where I now often photograph and hike.
Here in this gulch was the wash from those floods, now encompassed into a bar along the Columbia. The boulders below were carried both by the water and within icebergs. The entire Columbia River here and through the gorge to the Pacific was also largely carved out and deepened then.
All of this was so clear and plain here in the middle of this gray and ugly gulch. I crossed to the other side and to grass, made my way back up the shelf, and walked along its ridge. I was now off-trail again.
There’s something freeing about being off-trail. In the thick woods it can be dangerous, but here, with a clear view of everything in this world, it made me feel part of it all. I found a small coyote trail and went along it, noticing prints here and there.
I took no photographs as I walked a mile or so north. The soft grasses gave way to more rugged ground and sage, but I continued until I came up against a barbed wire fence.
I’m always a little hesitant to cross fences. I was fairly certain that it was public land on both sides, but I walked along it, waiting for a gate or an opening. In some time, I came to one – an opening where there once used to be a gate. This was public land after all. I knew there was an old ranch road that swung from the hills above and led down to the river. Once I found it, after a couple of miles of walking, I stayed with the ridge, following an older trace.
This brought me to a scene repeated throughout the deserts of the world: an old school bus left abandoned, spray-painted and gutted. I don’t know the story of this one. Maybe it was hippies who drove it down and couldn’t dig it out. Maybe it was a rancher who planted it there as a camp for his hands. This whole area was once a sheep ranch. Either is possible.
But here it sat, a school bus, stripped of everything, including the wheels and seats. The engine, coated in many layers of paint, stood open. The bus was a full-size late 1940s, early 1950s Dodge. Its windows were all broken out, and bullet holes pierced it on all sides. Generations of wasps had claimed it, so I didn’t enter, but poked my head inside. The seat had been removed and was sitting next to where a fire ring might have been.
I photographed it in color and black & white extensively. I had now switched to Fomapan 100 and finished off the Provia. In nearly every case, the color won out, and for the same reasons as the flowers - the yellow against the sage green and blackened basalt, the brown grasses and blue sky. There was a life within this color that black & white couldn’t translate.
With my last frame of Provia, I rested to change film and have my small lunch. I brought along a few rolls of expired Fuji Astia, a slide film that filled some perceived space between Fuji’s other offerings: the soft Provia and the intense Velvia. It was a line that didn’t last long, maybe 15 years. This had expired in 2000.
With age and how I develop my color film, I knew that there wouldn’t just be color shifts, there would be a borderline surreal representation of color. It looks back to a feeling I had when I first started photographing eastern Washington – I didn’t want to show how the place looked, but how it felt.
I ate my peanut butter sandwich and gathered my things. I tend to spread out when I photograph. With large format it’s the worst, but even with medium, even with only one camera, one lens, and two film holders, I can be a bit of a mess. I checked the ground to make sure I left nothing behind.
All along the hike, I had been taking quick videos with my phone and posting them as stories on Instagram. I thought that I wasn’t going to do this, and was a little unhappy with myself after the first few, finally giving in and sharing the whole day.
It’s not that I want to stay hidden or to keep these spaces for myself, but all week I had yearned to unplug and escape social media. And here, with every chance to do just that, I pulled myself back in. It was disappointing, but it was also a chance to share my morning with friends. It’s often difficult to tell what I actually want.
The ranch road I was walking made for a feeling like I was walking in history. Not just geologic, which was evident all around, but a history not too long before. These rough roads, now thankfully barred to motorized vehicles, were run by trucks and jeeps following the Second World War.
The eponymous lakes – Ancient and Dusty – also date from this time. For decades, both coulees were completely filled with water for and from irrigation. They were, essentially, reservoirs, and the strandlines from the varying water levels can still be seen along the slopes inside the coulees. Maybe the wheel that I photographed during the first part of my hike is from that era.
It was then that Ancient Lake got its name, though the people who named it knew it wasn’t ancient at all. But it’s a good name, so it stuck. But hell, even the coulees themselves aren’t ancient. I think we might have learned a lot since then.
I had nearly made a circle, drawing close to the shelf overlooking the Columbia, to where I had scrambled down the talus, to where the ravens played in the morning sun. I had searched for a path or trail out of this lower section and back to the main trail to the trailhead, but could find nothing and was running out of energy to explore.
The hike wasn’t a difficult one. The miles weren’t endless, but neither was my energy. I saw the path I took leading in and readied myself to hike it out. The ravens were gone, now roosting or playing somewhere else. The balsamroot flowers were still following the sun. The rock buckwheat flowers, which had been closed this morning, were now opening, likely for the first time that spring. The path was still steep and in full light of the sun.
After stopping to photograph a few flowers, I decided to just carry my camera slung on my shoulder rather than in my pack. Maybe I thought that I had already lived the moment, so having a camera at the ready wouldn’t matter. Maybe I needed to shift some weight.
I finished off the Fomapan and switched back to the color Fuji Astia and stopped much more often to rest and photograph and sometimes to just rest without taking a single photo.
Partway up the grade, I found a cool spot where the sun’s rays had not yet reached. I slung off my pack and had a fine view up and down the canyon. To this point, I had passed two other hikers, a couple returning from a camp they made the night before along the river.
Sitting there now, an older couple passed me. The husband was recording something on his GoPro and I seemed to have messed up his shot by existing. Pleasantries were exchanged and they made some remark about me finding shade. They weren’t wrong. I let them struggle up the hill and out of sight before I regained my feet and followed.
Finally at the top and back on the main trail, I could see that the waterfall from the morning was gone. It, like the lakes, was part of irrigation. When the orchard above the coulees was watering, we’d have a waterfall. When they weren’t, the waterfall was dry.
When I got back to my car, the parking lot at the trailhead was packed with over 80 cars. It was staggering. In the morning, there had been just 15, and already I was worried that Potholes Coulee/Ancient Lakes/the Quincy Lakes Unit of the Columbia Basin Wildlife Area had blown up.
And don’t get me wrong, it has. There are many times more people here now than were here a decade ago. And I never know what to think about that.
On one hand, too many people will overrun the land, or at least spoil the experience. On the other, if people don’t visit these places, if they don’t fall in love with them, we may lose them.
Potholes Coulee isn’t really in any danger of being lost. It’s well-loved and well-protected by the state. In recent years, they’ve actually added to the acreage. The locals visit often, and it’s not far enough away to keep Seattleites from invading. But still, there’s something about solitude.
Following my hike, I drove out and up to the next level of the canyon complex, the top level, part of the larger Columbia Plateau. I parked and hiked along a cliff that overlooked both Dusty Lake and Ancient Lake Coulees.
Below me were the two long canyons, and beyond the slot where the Columbia River flowed. Below me, my day was hidden, tucked away behind distance swales and falling unseen to the river. Also below me were dozens of scattered tents. But they were dwarfed by the breadth of the coulees, and even though there were more than I had ever seen, I had to look close to see them.
This second ramble added three miles to my day, but resting above even the spine between the canyons, above the hundreds of hikers arriving in their now more than 80 cars, I found that solitude.
Through the entire day, I shot only five rolls (the last was something called Kodak Lumiere, a sort of cousin of Ektachome with a bit more saturation). I’m sure I could have photographed much more, but at some point, I have to live my life and hike my own hike. And fifty photos from just a single day is kind of a lot if you think back to the times before content and digital.
That balance we try to strike as photographers between living in the moment and photographing that moment is encompassed in the much larger breadth of the day. I struck some sort of balance that day. It wasn’t the most balanced balance, but I’m more than satisfied with the hike and the day as well.
As for the photos, like the hike, they are what they are. This was my day, this is how it felt. This is my photography.
The third stone, curiously lying between the children and their parents, is to James Taylor, Elizabeth’s husband, whom she married in 1869 at the age of 21. James was from Missouri and was two years younger than Elizabeth.
The preamble to this story is hard to piece together. It was only written about after the occurrence on the bridhauntingsge, when opinions had already been formed and transformed by these events.
Somehow or another, at the age of 33, Elizabeth’s husband, James, died. It was 1882, but over the years, his untimely death morphed into an “unexplained” death, and then to a “suspicious” death. Finally, it was assumed that Elizabeth poisoned him with potato bug poison. However it happened, James was dead.
Over the course of the next two years, the town turned upon Elizabeth and her brother Thomas, who the papers described as an “unmarried man, whose mother kept house for him.” They were suspected as leaders of a larger gang of cattle thieves and general no-goods.
Things came to a head when Edwin Roberts was murdered in January of 1885. According to the Nebraska Signal:
Last week, Edwin Roberts, tenant on the farm of Mrs. Taylor in the southwest precinct of Clay County, went down to the Blue [Little Blue River] to cut some bushes, and while at work, Mrs. Taylor, two sons aged twelve and fifteen, and a hired youth not much older by the name of Brewer, drove up near where Roberts was at work.
They had with them a loaded shot gun. The younger boy held the team while the others got out and walked up to within a few steps of Roberts and at once shot and killed him.
The Taylor Family is said to be very depraved. The parties have been arrested and although the people are much excited over the murder, will probably await the action of the court.
The people of Spring Ranch were indeed much excited, but they were not about to await the action of the court. While the governor of Nebraska issued a warrant for the arrest of David Brewer, the locals believed they knew better what happened to Edwin Roberts.
Elizabeth’s two sons might have pulled the trigger, but it was Elizabeth and maybe her brother Thomas who were responsible. While Thomas was liked well enough, or at least tolerated, according to the local papers, Elizabeth “had never had a good reputation in the neighborhood.”
The same paper went on to describe her as: “not a tall woman, but rather short and stout and has rather a coarse expression about her face that is seldom seen in a woman.”
The family, especially after the untimely and/or suspicious death of her husband, James, grew to include what the locals considered a gang.
Of this gang, the Lincoln Daily Nebraska State Journal reported:
It seems as though there was an organized gang of hard characters in the Jones and Taylor families and there have been more or less strangers stopping among them who would not stop at anything short of murder, if even at that, and it seems as though it was the intention of the community to get rid of the whole pack and parcel of them.
Of late there has been a number of fires in the neighborhood, stock has been killed and various other atrocities have been perpetrated. Such things cannot last always and when the gang is routed out, then they will cease and people can live in peace.
But there was to be no peace. Again, according to local reports on Elizabeth:
After the murder of Roberts and the imprisonment of her two sons, she would always remain overnight at the home of her brother, going back and forth to her own home which is about a mile distant, only during the day. She was always afraid to stay at her own home alone although she was always armed or had arms handy.
The home of her brother, Thomas, was a sod house with walls four-feet thick. It was only one story and sat maybe ten feet high. Its front held two small windows and a door. The roof was sod and heavy, requiring four sturdy pillars running through the center of the house to hold it up. The inside was set up more like a stable than a house, with low walls dividing the sleeping quarters from the living spaces.
The events that transpired on the night of March 15, 1885, two months after the murder of Roberts, are confused, lied about, and likely forgotten. Reading from contemporary newspapers can only retell so much, but it is all that remains.
According to the Hastings Gazette Journal:
The mob appeared at the house of Tom Jones wherein were seven persons, Mrs. Jones [Margaret, the mother], Mrs. Taylor [Elizabeth] and her daughter, Maggie, a bright looking girl of five years of age, Nelson Celley, John Foster, Texas Bill [an alias], and an older person by the name of Clark, and a boy whose name no-one knew. As soon as the mob reached the house, they demanded that Mrs. Taylor [Elizabeth] and Tom Jones should come out, but instead of complying with the request, the door of the house was barricaded and other means taken to prevent a forcible entrance.
Those inside were well provided with firearms and just why they were not used by them is a mystery as they had just been purchased for such an occasion. After parlaying for some time, the men in the mob were determined to have them out and threatened to throw a bomb of dynamite in the window.
At this juncture, Tom Jones asked Texas Bill if he thought it would be safe to go out and was answered that it would. Thereupon Tom Jones said that he would come out and was told by the mob to crawl out of the window, as he would not be allowed to go out of the door and he was also told to leave all firearms behind him and crawl out with his hands up. This he did and upon his appearance was immediately covered with revolvers and guns and was taken to one side and his hands tied with a piece of rope which was procured from some mule harness belonging to Mrs. Taylor.
Mrs. Taylor was then ordered to come out and she too came out of the window the same way and had her hands tied also. The men then took them into a little open spot near the house and leaving them under a guard drew off a little ways and held a consultation which ended in Mrs. Taylor and Tom Jones being taken one direction and the other four men who were in the house were taken in another.
There was one thing noticeable in the transaction, that while three of the men’s hands were tied, Clark, Celley and a person whose name was not known as he had only been there one or two days, Texas Bill was allowed to go free and he made himself scarce. It is supposed by some that he was in with the mob.
Be that as it is, the other three were taken to the house of a Mr. Reese and locked up where they remained until late Sunday morning. The men who had Mrs. Taylor and Tom Jones in charge, told them what they intended doing. The couple then began pleading for mercy, but the men were obdurate. They were given time to pray shortly after having been taken from the house and again when they arrived at the bridge.
They both improved the brief opportunity allowed them to pray and when they arrived at the bridge, the ropes which were taken from some halters were adjusted around their necks and they were shoved off into eternity.
[Another paper reported: “Tom Jones’ neck was broken, but his sister, Mrs. Taylor, died the terrible death of strangulation.”]
The men then went back to the house where they had left Mrs. Jones and Mrs.Taylor’s daughter and begged her pardon for intruding and then took their departure.
The bodies remained hanging where they had been hung till Sunday afternoon about 3 o’clock. They were discovered about 8 o’clock in the morning by a woman who was crossing the bridge. Several persons were notified and one of them went to notify the coroner of Clay county, J. S. Liler, who arrived in the afternoon about 3 o’clock and cut the bodies down. A jury was impaneled and an inquest held. It was held secretly and the persons who testified to the jury could not or would not throw much light on the matter.
The bodies were placed in neat coffins and lay in the house where they were first taken until yesterday afternoon when they were taken to the Spring Ranch cemetery and buried both in one grave.
Before the burial, reporters circled and descended upon Spring Ranch, collecting what information they could. They found Margaret Jones, the mother of the two who were lynched, in Tom’s sod house. The reporter explained the layout of the house before adding:“At least that was all our reporter could see. If there was any other, it was hidden by the stygian darkness that reigned with the exception of just where the windows were.
On the bed near the stove sat the mother of Tom Jones and Mrs. Taylor. On being asked a number of questions by our inquisitive reporter in regard to the affair, she answered in a tone and manner which with the rude surroundings made the cold chills chase each other up and down his back. After gleaning all that could be obtained from her, our reporter got out of the house into the free air, glad that the ordeal was over.”
The reporter then went to the bridge to find a piece of the rope to keep as a souvenir, but found nothing.
A day or so after the lynching, the nearby town of Sutton “censured” the vigilantes, but for the most part, nobody was speaking. Over the course of the next few weeks, five of those thought responsible were rounded up and brought to Clay Center, the county seat. These were “well-to-do men and influential citizens,” according to a local paper. This attracted a large crowd of around 500 angry people who sided with the accused.
During the lead up to the trial, several of the leaders were identified by witnesses. But the crowd at the courthouse grew wild over the idea that the vigilantes might be convicted.
“Such a pressure was brought that Judge Burnett discharged all the prisoners,” read the Lincoln, Nebraska paper. “The mob then whooped and yelled and made threats against certain Hastings men, when John Ragan, their attorney, mounted the table and urged them to be quiet and keep the peace. After the examination, many guns and revolvers were seen, and this ended the effort to prosecute the supposed lynchers.”
Perhaps in an attempt to lay this whole thing to rest, a year later, Elizabeth’s two sons, William and John, who had been accused of murdering Edwin Roberts, were acquitted of all charges.
But it was not quite over for everyone involved. Three years later, according to the Omaha Daily Bee in February of 1888, “a small man with reddish grey whiskers, dressed in brown clothes with cap drawn down over his face” was found hanging to a nearby railroad bridge. This unnamed man was “a prominent farmer who had resided in this locality for years and the general conjecture is that it was a suicide caused from remorse.” He was one of the mob who lynched Elizabeth and Thomas, and had “become mentally unbalanced from remorse.”
I knew none of this when I took the photo, of course. All I knew was that here was a line of gravestones. It was probably a family. Three of them died in their early 30s. Two of them on the same day. There was a story here, I thought. And there was also a photo.
There was no unsettling feeling, no premonition of a story to be told. But I hoped something might come along.
My eyes then turned to a broken stone not far off. The base was still planted in the ground, with most of the stone leaned against it. “Farewell” it read above an engraving of two hands clasped.
“Susan, wife of Robert Cargill” it continued. “Died June 29, 1883; aged 42 years.”
I framed the stone with some foreground to give it space, moving the stone itself to the left of the frame. A small patch of weeds covered her death date. I made sure to not lose the “Farewell” to the background.
Susan died two years before the lynching of Elizabeth Taylor and Thomas Jones, but her absence might have sent their own ripples through her family and through the community of Spring Ranch.
Susan and her husband Robert had ten children together, all of whom were still alive when she passed on at the young age of 43. Following her death, Robert and the family moved north to Merrick County. Two of their ten children, Lewis, born in 1869, and Margaret, born in 1877, became close.
Margaret married Absolom Baird, originally from Iowa, and by 1902 had two children, a boy and a girl.
The Howard County Herald told the most complete story. By “complete,” I do mean that, and I warn you that it does not shy away from the details. But this was how journalism was done in the early 1900s. And this is how I’ll present it:
Dead By Her Own Hand
Gage Valley Woman Suicides Without Apparent Cause
Margaret Baird, wife of A.D. Baird of Gage Valley precinct, committed suicide yesterday afternoon by shooting herself through the head with a 22-calibre rifle. The deed was done during the absence of her family and was evidently the result of deliberately laid plans. The news of the affair was brought to town late in the evening and Coroner Grothan went out immediately to hold an inquest.
A jury [...] was empanelled and, at the solemn hour of midnight, with the body of the unfortunate woman still lying on the floor covered with her own blood, a verdict was found that she came to her death by a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Mr. Baird was in St. Paul [Nebraska] until late last evening. At about 4 o’clock in the afternoon Mrs. Baird sent her two children to a neighbor’s with instructions not to return for an hour and a half. After they had gone she prepared to take her own life with the utmost deliberation. She wrote a note which she left lying in a conspicuous place. It read as follows:“I don’t want to blame Abb for this because I did it myself. I make everyone miserable. I love Abb as dear as I could anyone. Goodbye. From Mag to Abb. Abb, I love you. I am so shaky.”
She then loaded the rifle, seated herself on a chest, placed the muzzle against her right temple and pulled the trigger. She had previously prepared herself for the coffin by dressing herself in black.
No motive for the rash deed is known. Mrs. Baird was a woman of between 23 and 25 years and had always enjoyed fairly good health. She was a daughter of Robert Cargill, a well known Gage Valley farmer. Besides her husband she leaves two children – a boy and a girl – the oldest being only about 6 years of age.
She also left Lewis, her brother. He took the news hardest of all. He was unmarried and lived alone near to the Bairds. A month later in May 1902, the St. Paul, Nebraska Phonograph ran a story with the garish headline: “Louis Cargilll Insane.” His name was misspelled, but it continued:Since the death of his sister, Mrs. A.D. Baird, by suicide, Louis Cargill has been subject to severe attacks of melancholy and about a week ago his father, Robert Cargill, took him home. It seems that nothing could be done to remove the effect of the sad termination of his sister’s life.
This so preyed upon his mind that a physician was called and after careful examination it was thought best to bring the matter before the board of insanity.
Acting on this, a session of the board was held last Monday and after hearing all the evidence, it was thought best to take the patient to Lincoln.
This is indeed a sad case and it is to be hoped that Mr. Cargill will soon be restored to health.”
Another paper, the Lincoln Daily Post, clarified, explaining that Louis [sic] Cargill “has become violently insane and will have to be placed in an asylum.”
Just over two weeks later, the Howard County Herald ran a very short story, not even bothering with a headline:
Louis Cargill, the Gage Valley farmer who was taken to the insane asylum at Lincoln about a month ago, died the early part of last week. His health has failed rapidly as a result of his mental affliction and death came quickly to his relief.
Less than two months after the death of his wife, and two weeks following the death of Louis, Absolom Baird moved away. This too was covered in the St. Paul Phonograph:
A.D. Baird and children, Lonella and Jessy, left Friday morning for Redding, Iowa. He has rented his farm and goes to accept a position with his brother at the carpenter trade.
He intended to leave Monday morning, but was detained on account of the sickness and death of Lewis Cargill. We are sorry to see him leave, as we always considered him one of our best neighbors, always ready to give a helping hand. We sincerely hope he will decide to return to his farm, and wish him success in his new undertaking.
Four years later, the A.D. Baird farm was sold to the highest bidder. He would not be returning.
As I snapped this final picture of Susan Cargill’s grave in Spring Ranch Cemetery, I knew none of this. There wasn’t even a hint of a story. There was only warm sunshine and this broken stone. I used a very dark neutral density filter and a brass lens without a shutter. I help open the exposure for four seconds, counting softly to myself.
Spring Ranch is "known" as the most haunted ghost town in Nebraska, though I'm not sure by which metric it achieved that knowing.
While I was there with my camera, I felt no hauntings, no specters, spooks or haints. There are no ghosts in the ghost town of Spring Ranch, and the cemetery is filled with the town's history, parceled out for those who can read it in marble and granite, and for those who are willing to dig a little deeper.
