It’s six hours from Denver to the Comanche National Grasslands. Eight or ten or something like that if you drive without purpose. I stopped counting at dark. Denver to Trinidad, Trinidad east on dirt county roads for another 100 miles. Doesn’t seem like much from eye level, but if you take it slow, the flat Colorado plains share smaller secrets, a hidden landscape in negative relief, canyons that slice the land in such a way that they’re almost imperceptible until you’re balanced right at the edge. It’s the third deer hunt I’ve photographed in the last 12 months, the second one with friends of mine who make this trip every year. A little bit about the deer, a little more about getting out and slowing down for a week. Life always waits just up the highway, no need to rush it along. It’s always there when you get back.
MORE PHOTOS
It’s been a few years since I photographed Bobby Tan removing glass from his eyebrow with butter knives. A little time has come and gone, but the same enthusiasm and intensity that motivated the butter knife incident are still definitely intact. Went over to his place a couple weeks ago to look through some of his art, mostly drawings and collage-mash books, all projects that have been consuming hours of his time each day. He’s got a little corner set up in his house, a set of pens, and has been churning out work for several months now. It’s quite a stack of stuff that really speaks to the time and energy he’s putting into it. Pretty impressed by his trajectory and definitely a fan of the work. Stepped out for a few minutes to catch his opening tonight at Double Daughters in downtown Denver. Figured I’d post this for today and put the hunt images off until tomorrow.
MORE PHOTOS
Got home from photographing a deer hunt yesterday afternoon, caught the second game of the World Series at a sushi place and then detoured to Glob for a benefit Halloween show. Strange how quick you can go from Oklahoma border to sushi and hipster Halloween haunts, but I kinda enjoy the edges of the spectrum. Snapped a few filler pictures at Glob, listened to a little music and called it a night. Uneventful Halloween except for the bastard kids that cleaned out twelve pounds of candy that I left in a bucket on my front porch. The doorbell broke a few weeks ago so I figured that the best strategy was to put the candy out. I know that plan would have spelled sure fire failure if it was 12 pounds of chocolate, but the bag of candy that I had on hand was the cheapo bag of smarties and suckers and dried bubble gum. You’d be hard pressed to eat 12 pounds of it in a decade. Stealing the whole bucket, in my mind, would have been like shoplifting a tub of lard. Far be it from me to underestimate the power of free stuff. Cleaned out of candy in ten minutes.
Hunt pictures to follow tomorrow.
MORE PHOTOS
Posted by Matt 10.25.2009 Under Personal
the 
Wrapped up my work late last night and went out to catch a haunted house party that some friends had been working on all day. The house wound around through a maze of oddities, terminating at the back of the building in a little garage space where a few bands finished up the night. Stuck around for Warren Bedell’s band, Spellcaster. The damn Pharaoh hat thing made my night.
MORE PHOTOS
Posted by Matt 10.11.2009 Under Personal
This weekend was marked by Denver’s first snow of the season, a blast of cold that came almost three weeks before its more traditional appearance on Halloween Eve. For anyone not familiar with my bad winter attitude, I love the west. I hate the snow. Really, I hate the tiny snows, the little flurries that pass through town, freeze my green garden, cause people to drive at a fraction of the speed limit, and make the outdoors a less pleasant place to spend time. I’d trade a winter’s worth of flurries for two or three days of real, honest blizzard. You know, the kind of snow that reminds you how small you are, that packs your front door closed and shuts down the city for days at a time. If Father Winter’s gonna hit you, I kinda feel like the only honorable way to deliver the disrespect is in the form of a knockout punch.
Anything less is a waste of time.
I’m just speculating, but I suspect Zach’s van may have shared my sentiments as it huffed its dying breath. In its own quiet effort to rage, rage against the dying the of the (summer) light, it lit on fire yesterday. Unexplained and spontaneous, it went out with a final fiery finger to the cold weather that had settled in on the city. The fire consumed the front part of the van, the back part of Zach’s fence, and all the crappy snow that surrounded it. It’s sad to see the old beast go, but good to see it go down swinging.
Made a quick round-trip to Albuquerque this weekend. Ended up stumbling into –er, more of around –the Balloon Fiesta on the trip back to Denver. Mostly US 285, a less circuitous (and more interesting route) than the interstate. ABQ, bypassing Santa Fe, Los Alamos, Ojo Caliente, Antonito, Monte Vista, Salida, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, reaching darkness around the Arkansas River. Everything south of the Arkansas and west of the 100th Meridian was ceded by Mexico to the United States by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, sprinkling a huge portion of southern Colorado and all of New Mexico with a bit of Mexico (the older).
MORE PHOTOS
out·take (out
t
k
) n.
1.
a. A section or scene, as of a movie, that is filmed but not used in the final version.
b. A complete version, as of a recording, that is dropped in favor of another version.
2. An opening for outward discharge; a vent.
***
The space is really what kills people out here. The same thing that draws them in also turns them away. It never ceases to amaze me how much effort is given towards filling it in. Houses and strip malls, highways, trails, paved trails, trails with lights so you can walk at night, telephone poles and information kiosks. The mighty hand of progress has decided that the west is a blank page to be filled, a canvas to be colored. I’m pretty sure that the eastern artists got it right when they decided to embrace the white of the paper, to let the negative space signify the clouds, the oceans, those spaces so sacred that the hand of man could not reproduce them without risking blasphemy. On those scrolls, the white is a resting point to contemplate the relationship between the things that are painted and the things that are not.
Tomorrow it looks like I’m off to Albuquerque for a couple days. More photographs to stash away into my drawer, a quiet love affair with the great west. The trip winds along the forward edge of the Rocky Mountains where the expansive, open ocean of middle America breaks against a geography that pulls upward nearly three miles into the atmosphere. The journey will close out two weeks that have afforded me yet another trip to Colorado’s northern neighbor, connecting the dots along a span of highway covering nearly 20 hours.
The images that mark off the stopping points along that line fall into one of two categories: images that are part of the unfinished sentence of a work-in-progress or photographs handed over to editors for future publication. In either case, not suitable for the blog. What remains are the fragments chipped away from the bigger picture and left on the floor. Interesting, but not quite contextualized. They are bastard pictures, outtakes, orphans, photographs with no home. An art opening, a stop at friend and filmmaker Chris Bagley’s Cheyenne, Wyoming home (that doubles as a live-in prop house), highway, parking lots, and the frozen frames projected of old commercials, cult movies, and everything else in between.
Here’s to another week celebrating everything in between.
MORE PHOTOS
