out·take (out
t
k
) n.
1.
***
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.