Adventure: South Central

Color photography. A mind shift. Wide, spacious frames, void of humanity, based on tone, time, and color. Early and late gasps of sunlight. The ingredients of the forced relocation of creative assets. Open spaces need to be approached in new ways, but the fallback plan is based on the greatest hits. Light, timing, and composition. If nothing else, build with the basics.

This works because I am giving the time required. Patience and low expectations. This place, these images, aren’t for the headlines. These images, and more importantly the experience, are for me alone, at least when they are being made. Just me and this is enough. After all, it started this way. Wander with camera. Over the hilltop, the white boxes of comfort lined up wall to wall. The panels of white plastic are painted by flickering lights of the nearby village. So bright the reflection allows me to shut off my headlamp and let my eyes adjust. The darkness of night infringed by balloons of whiteness from Alamagordo, Socorro, and Las Cruces.

Across the 42 West, a semi-destination in mind. Pavement ends and dirt begins. Bone dry with pockets of snow reserved for the deepest and darkest of places feeling no love from the sun. There are others here hunting like me. Telltale signs like binoculars, backpacks, mud-caked cars with guidebooks in the window. Curt nods of acknowledgment. We are one and the same, mostly. The chatter of homelife fades. The noise of the world, although visceral and here more than there, is different. Here, I am the noise. I am in my place and part of something larger, something real.