29 Palms - Postcards from the Desert
A weekend trip to 29 Palms and Joshua Tree with some close friends. A chance to make pictures that are not part of my 15000 Buddhas project...although in the end I made a few:) This gallery marks a departure for me. It's a grab bag of disparate elements connected only by time...what perhaps life really is when when we aren't projecting a narrative on it. In any case these are pictures I made over a few days without any plan or project. Just shooting whatever looked interesting next.
The portraits were mostly made in about fifteen minutes on Saturday evening. The light became suddenly magical and I grabbed one friend after another and said "let's do a portrait right now!" A turn into the light, the trust that comes from knowing someone for a time and they were done. I've never photographed so many so quickly and I think so well.
The abstracts are ...abstract. Just about the shape things take and the way they come together. And then there are some pinhole lens pictures of the desert and the shrines. With a pinhole and a DSLR you can't see the results before shooting and sometimes it's wonderful to imagine, not to know.
Roadside shrines, I've been looking at them for a year or two now thinking that sooner or later I should shoot one to find out if they were part of the 15000 Buddhas project. This weekend I saw one that said "Start with me". The experience of standing close to these shrines is very different from driving by. Up close you learn the name, you may see pictures of the person, you see the things loved ones have brought to mark the ground. I know now they are sacred places. I will probably do more.
The motel and desert pictures are postcards....but I mean that in a good way. Before instant everything postcards were an important part of traveling. Pictures we bought as we traveled and sent to our friends with a few words scribbled on them so they could share a sense of what we were experiencing. These pictures feel like that to me. Postcards from the weekend. Hi everybody, wish you were here!
