By happy chance, I’d used good film that day and an equally suited lens. Nowadays the photograph is dressed up with pigment inks, but it’s pretty much the same old print. Can we begin feeling nostalgia for drum scans? Years later it was drum scanned and then “remastered” into Photoshop. It began as a C Print a few weeks after I took the picture. The glowing gate has had several incarnations. We weren’t far from Marfa, a place reknowned for its mysterious lights and the minimalism of Donald Judd. The picture was made on negative film with my incomparable Superwide. The gate burst into a furious red color which is difficult to forget. Grabbing my Hasselblad, I stepped into the dry air. We were motoring across an expanse of grasslands as the sun was preparing to set. I’ve made numerous trips to West Texas because Big Bend is hard to stay away from. It was on the rebound from one of those vacations that we encountered the glowing gate. In other words: this is not southern Utah (a place which could be described as the world’s largest primitive campsite). But before you even get there you’ll have passed by a number of colossal ranches, some rivaling small European nations in size. Don’t think twice about it…it’s well worth the drive. If you go there expecting to recreate you are ushered down to the 1 million acres of Big Bend National Park. Private property–on a scale unknown anywhere else in the United States. West Texas is an area with a lot in common with other parts of the Southwest, but there is a striking difference: West Texas: Encounter With the Glowing Gate There’s a link for Vachon’s image (at the Library of Congress) below in the comments.Īnd, keeping within this theme–two related posts from a few months ago: As I flip through their books nowadays, it’s hard not to notice the similarity between the furrows in the fields and the deep lines in the faces.
They were warm-toned, bittersweet and full of lonely grass.īoth photographers looked closely at the people as well. The photographer wisely chose to make C Prints. This time, many of the photographs were in color. A few decades later, Plowden published The Floor of The Sky. Behind them: a one-roomed schoolhouse in blowing sheets of snow. It looks cold, and the children are constructing a fort. He took many images, but none is more deeply felt than the one of school children playing in a snow storm.
By the 1930’s it was already apparent that this was not an easy place for a gig. Vachon was an artist employed by the FSA seventy years ago during the depression, and was one of the first photographers to focus a lens on the life and landscapes of the farming population of the Dakotas. There have been books which tell the of the struggle, and Willa Cather’s My Antonia is a personal favorite. But the contest has also being written into the the photographic record. Two photographers come to mind: John Vachon and David Plowden. It’s the same story from Saskatchewan to the Texas panhandle. At the moment, the plains are back in charge, especially west of the 100th meridian where the middle of North America is filling up with ghost towns. The plains are the least photographed part of North America–a fact which is even more astonishing when you realize that they represent about a third of the United States.Īs I’ve written before, this is a place which is currently reexamining a number of historic assumptions–having had a lengthy quarrel with invading Europeans. My companion took no pictures, but I was engaging the question. Once you get into this part of the country you begin asking yourself, “Now what do we do?” As usual, we were out on the greyest roads on the map. The abandoned house was discovered after an afternoon of zig-zagging through the plains. Nowadays they’re stored in the basement in a shoe box near my record collection. I could travel light and shoot without a tripod.
I liked them both because they were undersized. I also owned the 645S–similarly designed with the addition of a “roll bar”.
In both cases, the capture involved archaic weaponry: a roll of Kodak negative film and an obscure 120 film camera. For this one, it was the Fuji 645W, an odd plastic camera known for its unusually sharp lens. I’ve queued up another image from the archives–one with a similar story to the glowing gate from the previous post.