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.

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The car doesn’t make a sound as it begins to decelerate.  It’s two in the morning and ‘Interstate’ doesn’t exactly mean much in Wyoming at that hour.  There are no cars on the horizon, no glow from beyond the the hills in either direction.  The digital fuel gauge reads 1/8th of a tank, though the rental is clearly out of gas.  My fingers fumble at the hazard lights.  The conclusion is so foregone that I can’t even summon the energy to curse as the car slows onto the shoulder.  Trekking a half mile to the south, I crest the top of the hill that separates the dead automobile from the great, black expanse of the landscape beyond.  The road is empty enough that I can safely walk up the middle of the highway as I try to find the nearest mile marker.  Post 38.  My ragged road map puts my little life raft some 30 miles from Cheyenne and an almost equal distance from Chugwater, a tiny municipality mired in straits dire enough to compel its management to offer near-free land to anyone who would move there.  For the price of the wrecker and five gallons of gas, I could just buy a lot in the forsaken town and stay there.  Hertz be damned, they can come get their little lying machine if they want it back.

Popping the hatchback on the car, I sit down and face toward empty lanes of traffic.  My boots flash on and off, heeled against the asphalt as the tail lights flicker their little jig.  The sky is deep, clear enough to see through to the bottom, those tiny specs of stars that fill the gaps between the brighter, more visible ones that the city is accustomed to.  Every few seconds a slice of light like a scalpel cuts through the dark sky.  A meteor shower is well underway.  I smile at the second edge of the sword; I would have driven right under it or slept right through it or otherwise seen it and promised myself that I’d watch it next year when it came around again.

I call the tow, ask for gas and sit back for the show, full well expecting not to see the wrecker ’til the light of dawn.  It’s a 30 minute drive to Cheyenne, but getting someone out of bed and motivated to make the journey is the kind of convenience that knows its boundaries.

An hour passes.  Then another.  The only people to stop pull up in a Towncar, artists on their way to Denver.  The passenger’s name is latin, though I can’t quite recall.  TIno or Tito or Rodrigo or Esteban.  Dominican, I presume.  But I don’t ask.  He opens the cooler between him and the woman driving, pulling out a beer to compliment the one that he’s holding in his other hand.  He offers it to me through the open window as we collectively come to the conclusion that there’s not much they can do to help me.  I turn down the beer, afraid to undo the truck stop coffee that’s sustained me to this point.  We don’t have a hose to siphon any of their gas and there’s no space in their car to take me into town.  It’s packed to the hilt with boxes and trinkets, a cooler full of beer, and the two gypsy-souled people mad enough to stop.  I tell them there’s a tow headed for me, which, as if summoned by the words, arrives on cue.

The Domincans pull away as an unkept man hops down, standing on the fuel tank under the door of the wrecker.  He’s already flipped the PTO.  The hydraulics angle the flatbed down towards the car.  I yell up to him that I only called for gas.  He quietly curses, thinks it over, and offers to tow me to town for the same price.  There’s no gas can in his truck, the details of my initial call apparently caught up in the cogs of the graveyard shift at the tow company.  Within minutes, he’s got the car up on the flatbed, chained into place and we’re off, jogging through Wyoming’s pre-dawn toward the nearest filling station.  The shape of the mountains to the west come through in purples and blues, the deepest shadows still black as the man tells me about the races in Cheyenne, how the owner of the track is too cheap to do basic upkeep to the place.  It’s costing the track good racers, people won’t pay entrance fees to put their cars on a piece-of-shit track, spectators won’t pay ticket fees to watch those that will.  It’s a spiral that builds its own negative momentum until the nobody cares to come to Wyoming anymore.  There’s another track a couple hours east in Nebraska and, out there, the owner is a man who sees the longview, who knows what it takes to bring in good drivers.  The people will always follow the good ones.

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This project started by accident when friend and fellow photographer Michael Rubenstein loaned me a Polaroid back for a Holga camera in 2007.  Ten frames later I was sold.  The Polaroid brings two photographic methods that are seemingly at odds with each other together into one format.  You get the immediacy of digital with the tangible, ’share-ability’ of film.  A few days after borrowing Rubenstein’s back, I returned to Colorado and bought my first ten dollar Land Camera, a relatively obsolete Polaroid with limited control and a cost-prohibitive cap on how much film I could actually shoot.  Now priced at over a dollar a frame, the format forces a judicious approach to making frames, something that the bottomless 32 gig digital cards seem to undermine.  Listen to the clicks on the tape of any news conference and you will, no doubt, hear photographers pushing the limits of 24 frames-per-second, a method of shooting so rapid and oblivious as to make the process closer to shooting a movie than a still frame.

Since 2007, the camera has gone with me almost everywhere I’ve been, from my next door neighbor’s living room after his open-heart surgery to Obama’s inauguration.  Until earlier this year, I’d been looking at all these different events as isolated series of images; recently, it’s become obvious that there is a bigger tale of Americana at hand in the thread that winds through all of the photographs.  NPR’s Claire O’Neill recently helped me put together an edit of this work-in-progress that gets at this.  I’m very happy with her final edit and even happier that she’s taken the time to share it on NPR’s blog, The Picture Show.  Please have a look for yourself and feel free to revisit my website in the coming weeks.  I’m working on a comprehensive edit of this work that will bring all the Polaroid galleries into one, bigger grouping of pictures.

Just added a complete edit of the Diving Bell work to my site that the folks at Luceo helped me put together earlier this week.  Really appreciated everyone’s comments on this stuff and would like to invite you all to see the final product here.

Spent the Fourth up in Colorado mountain town of Idaho Springs at the Spencer party.  Same show every year, sitting up on a mountainside watching the fireworks from above while the rest of the town watches them from the valley below.  

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[Exhausted after moving an organ]

I agreed sometime during the daylight hours to help friends move an organ.  It was something that I had done in passing while the sun was still out, full well knowing that I had meetings that would run through the evening hours and then some business to catch up on thereafter.  I arrived for the move late, close to midnight.  Tripp was busy scrubbing the baseboard in his room while Zach gathered trash bags to set out on the curb.  June 30th with a July 1st deadline to vacate the house.  Moving is something that is rarely accomplished with any time left to spare.  It is a sport for procrastinators.

At midnight, the house was almost clean.  The only things left were details.  A few boxes here and there, a little cleaning, and the chore of capturing one of Tripp’s semi-feral cats from the crawl space where it had barricaded itself against the impending move.  The basement appeared as a coal shaft, lightless, humid, hot.  At it’s narrowest point, little more than three feet separated the subfloor of the house from the dirt and junk that had been backfilled into the void over the course of decades.  Mining for cats, or so it appeared as Tripp drug a work-light into the dusty abyss.  

Within an hour, the cat had given up.  Tired of running tiny laps through its subterranean hideout, the kitty carrier became the easiest option for a beast inclined towards idleness.  With the cat back in the bag, the final task of the night  shifted to the original goal of delivering the organ to its new home on the other side of the city.

Musical instruments, like cameras, are things that change hands.  They are tools that creative people hate to see wasted such that when it becomes untenable to keep them any longer, they are not tossed out with the garbage.  These things are passed on to other people with the hope that, in their next life, they will no longer sit idle, rather be the channel through which masterpieces are moved.  Zach’s oversized church organ, a solid block of wood and electronics weighing in at only slightly less than a full-size upright piano, had sat broken in the back room of the old rental for a period of years before the move-out gave him the impetus to find a new home for it.  John, a musician and de facto dead organ junk-piler, had amassed a small heap of the bulky instruments in the back of his warehouse space.  A perfect fit.  He agreed to take it.  Perhaps he would be able to fix it or, perhaps, it would make an interesting prop to fill space between the cinder block walls.  Either way, it was better than dumping it in the alley.

***

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Did a portrait series of the Luceo folks on the last night of our meeting.  More Polaroids with a little experimental twist tossed in.  Photographing photographers is a little stressful –ok, a lot stressful.  Took a few quiet minutes with Kevin German to play around with some test frames and get my head on straight before calling everyone out, one at a time.  After 50 frames, a pep talk from German, and a couple hours, I felt like I came away with something I could be proud of.

Kendrick did a fun series of Polaroid 600s in 2007 and just posted it to her blog, here.  There’s still something incredibly appealing about these old analogues.  With any luck, Fuji will keep this stuff in production for the foreseeable future.  I’m not really ready to stop shooting it just yet.

***

Dan Celvi just passed this note to me re. Polaroid’s future.  Apparently it’s old news to everyone except me.  Still, more than glad to see this:

“I dunno if you saw this article or not, but in case you didn’t, I figured I’d send you the link. Basically, some guy somehow managed to spur a few million from random investors to help them keep the Polaroid line alive for no other reason to keep it going.

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