On Common Ground
People aren’t actually as far apart as it seems; we are just staring at the world through different windows from different daily routines. Sometimes we are flying over, looking down from 30,000 feet above places like the Midway Drive-in Theater, where the marquee advertises its location between Turkey and Quitaque—fittingly, a midpoint between New York and Los Angeles.
Barstow Modern
The charm of the historic Folk Victorian structure is undeniable. It possesses a quiet beauty and structural dignity that reflects the intentionality of an earlier era. Yet, building with early-twentieth-century methods and dimensional lumber is no longer practical. To attempt a literal reproduction is to choose fragility over performance.
Dry Plate Factory
The Dry Plate Factory began as a nickname for a photo darkroom.
Ambient Light Meter
An ambient light meter may help your photography more than a new camera. A new sensor might give you a cleaner file at some extreme ISO or a few extra megapixels to crop into, but it doesn't change how you actually evaluate a landscape. A new camera usually just changes the interface; it doesn't change your relationship with the sun. When you rely entirely on an internal reflective meter, you’re letting a computer guess based on whatever it's looking at. If you’re framing an old brick building against a blazing West Texas sky or working around high-contrast industrial metal, that internal meter gets tricked. It tries to average everything out, and you end up fighting the camera's guesswork before you even press the shutter.
White-Pool House
Odessa, Texas
Findings
In a desktop browser with site navigation, a black-and-white picture of a city shows buildings and old cars, accompanied by descriptive text. The picture brings a little something from the past back to life. In it, I see fragments, details, and things long replaced. I’m grateful someone stood there and recorded it for posterity, and more than a two-dimensional time capsule, it’s a template for making new pictures.
From Newsprint to the Artist’s Zine
How do newspapers still hit newsstands post-2025? A broadsheet with morning coffee was once a daily ritual.
Sandstone Store
Odessa, Texas
Shoulder to Shoulder and Different
To hold a belief deeply while remaining open to the world is to understand that our personal worldview is never a universal law, but simply a unique set of coordinates on an infinitely expanding sphere. The moment we treat our subjective perspective as an absolute truth, our thinking becomes rigid and clumsy, forcing the world into narrow, artificial categories instead of meeting it as it is. True humility lies in recognizing that our thoughts and creative spaces are vital practices, yet they are not the end-all, be-all—they are merely open windows to a much larger, interconnected reality.
Today
A simple note. If there’s something you want to do, do it today, not tomorrow, not five years from now. Do it today. This is it. This short moment is all anyone gets. Spend your time wisely. Work wisely.
So far apart
Odessa makes the most sense in a car on Grant Avenue at night listening to Only the Lonely.
Low and Slow
When scratching at something, the perfect vantage point is impossible. Big places show that it’s tough to have a full perspective up close, same for standing too far back. Yet with a normal lens, we enter the perfect vantage point for seeing something wherever we are, even if the focus is slow.
Roomy
I write like West Texas looks. Always room for more space. See. Way off. There.
Little West Texas
Wind pushes a windmill. Cattle grazing. Getting fat.
Out on a Stretch
Sometimes I don’t know if I’m out on a stretch or out on a stretch of highway. The thing I’ve learned in taking pictures is that when you’re out with the camera, you have thoughts. I like to sit and write those thoughts down. Some of what I’ve posted is exactly that.
Living Snapshot
A change of scenery is a change of mind. If I could write one thing that’s lasting and useful, that would do. We usually sound repetitive inside, but outside, we become something new.
The Universe Observing Itself
We are the universe standing in our shoes.
Truck Stop Coffee
West Texas prose should sound as flat and dry as an industrial equipment manual, and every sip should taste like a thirty-mile stretch of highway.
Overpass
Monahans, Texas
The Ethics of Seeing
This practice is built on the belief that photography is a way to stay tethered to the real world. Using a detached, topographic approach, the work records the landscape exactly as it is — without the distortion of sentiment or the distraction of escapism. Whether the subject is beautiful or uncomfortable, the goal remains the same: to provide an honest, standard-lens account of the places we inhabit. This is not art as a hiding place; it is art as a form of witnessing.