One Hour Photo
There was a time when photography was just another errand you ran on a Saturday afternoon. You dropped a roll of film off at the one-hour photo lab, picked it up a few days later, and then tore open that paper envelope in the passenger seat on the way home. It wasn’t precious or performative; it was simply how life got recorded. You’d flip through the 4x6 prints, laugh at an accidental thumb over the lens, and stick the keepers in a large photo album.
A Note on Method
Photography is neither an act of extraction nor an exercise in illustrating a preconceived thesis. It is a handshake with the unconscious—a reflexive, pre-rational agreement made long before the intellect or ego can step in to name what is happening.
Local, Little, and Unvarnished
Publishing quiet work feels like whispering in a crowded room. It makes you wonder if anyone needs another photo of an ordinary building, another page of prose, or another zine about West Texas dirt.
Memory
Memory is a creative act. We forge our memories long after we have lived them.
The Weight of the Instrument
Most cameras are designed to be cheerful. They are marketed with lifestyle videos that make everyday life look like an endless adventure.
The Old Truck
There is a certain kind of comfort in using things that take their time.
The Single Frame
Shooting 8x10 forces you to slow down because the process demands it. When every sheet of film costs money, takes up physical weight, and requires a full darkroom session just to see if you got it right, you stop wasting exposures on things that don’t matter.
The Architecture of Sight: Focal Length as Intent
Tools do not just execute work; they dictate thought. The choice between a 35mm equivalent field of view and a 50mm standard view is not a technical calculation of glass and megapixels. It is a psychological switch.
Open Air
Part of art’s appeal is that it is closed off. It operates with a strange idea of the public—signaling that it doesn’t need the people it claims to serve. Let it be walled off. There is room to be creative on the outside, in the open air, where things are real and unmanaged.
Let It Be a Mystery
Trying to think about my photography kit. I have so much gear that I can’t begin to use it all, and I’ve had to reexamine what, why, and how I photograph. Free time, funding, location, and material costs are all things that have changed and that I’ve had to navigate.
Street Primes
The 28mm and 50mm make a formidable two-lens combination, but the 35mm remains the ultimate single choice. Unlike the geometric abstraction of the others, a 35mm puts you in direct dialogue with the material reality of the scene.
The Grace of Restraint
It is a smallness in us — this urge to line a canyon with access roads, this habit of picking fights with quiet things, this loss of restraint in the name of control. Yet the outfitter in Terlingua speaks up, the sheriff looks at the cliff and calls it God’s wall, and for a moment, the engines idle on the dirt.
The Intermediate: RC Paper as a Practical Bridge
There is a persistent idea in traditional photography that if a darkroom print isn’t washed on heavy fiber-based paper for an hour and flattened under a heat press, it doesn’t count. Resin-coated (RC) paper is often treated as a temporary step—something you use for quick contact sheets or working proofs before making the “real” print. But that view misses a far more practical way to work.
The Open Air
We do not need high-ceilinged galleries to justify the work. We do not need permission from curators, nor do we need a complex vocabulary to explain what is already standing in front of us.
Billion Dollar Patrol Road
The moral failure here is not about a budget line or a contractor’s check. It is about what happens when a nation decides that its own laws are disposable, and that the public land it swore to protect is merely space waiting to be scraped flat.
The Loss of Stewardship
There are places in this country that were supposed to be off-limits to our worst impulses. Big Bend was one of them. For generations, the idea of a national park was a quiet agreement between ourselves and the land: a promise that some places were too rare, too slow to form, and too fragile to be carved up by the politics of the day. Watching heavy machinery roll past Santa Elena Canyon to scrape wide access corridors through intact desert feels like a total breakdown of that agreement.
Preserve Big Bend’s Wild Character
We’d always joke that the toll for having Big Bend in your backyard was living in Odessa—a small price to pay to endure the flat ground. You load up early on a weekend, head south down Highway 385 through Crane and McCamey, watch the pump jacks give way to mesa country, and by early afternoon, you’re pitching tents at Rio Grande Village Campground—a cherished memory.
Without Friction
Someday I’ll age—it isn’t guaranteed, but it is likely. I hope to approach it with a realistic, adaptable mindset. Many people live with their minds in one era and their bodies in another. I intend to stay where my body is—present in its changes and current surroundings. I am not young, and I have no need to act like it. I can grow older and remain in tune if I choose to do so.
Odessa Meteor Crater
It had been a long while since I had exposed a roll of film. It was so long that I had forgotten how to load the camera. After fidgeting with the M3, I managed to advance the film a few clicks.
A Code of Stewardship
Growing up, I was taught a simple code: respect the land, leave no trace, and have the wisdom to leave certain places just as you found them.