Arizona

Long day driving today. Not sure how many miles, but I was on the third tank of gas by the time I landed for the night. It was cool to cross the continental divide. I drove across this once before when I was 16, driving cross-country through Montana ( I believe) with my best friend Mars. It was one of the classic summer trips you can only do in high school. New Mexico is really beautiful, but it is desolate. Driving along the back roads of Oklahoma and Texas, you'd go for 15 miles or so, then slow down to go through a little town of a couple hundred then back to the ope road. In New Mexico, you go 70 miles a stretch without seeing anything but grazing cattle. There's a lot of open road in this country and wonderful to see just a sliver of it.

New Mexico back roads

Texas back roads

Texas selfy

Oklahoma back roads

View from the room

Econo Lodge, Gallup, New Mexico

1600 N Pennsylvania Ave, Mangum, OK

Some of these are starting to look alike. Sometimes when I get to a town I see a few houses that I hope will turn out be mine. Like this one, a lot of the houses around it were, let's just say, not as nice. Plus, this has to be only fancy car in town, of course parked right in the driveway. It would nice to have some dilapidated house for the series, but it wasn't meant to be.

Tommorrow starts the long journey west. Next stop is Richmond, CA, 1500 miles away. I'm a little sad that I only have a few more 1600's left.

View from the room, Mangum, OK

I thought about doing a series of pictures of the view from my motel/hotel room. I thought of it in Dallas, but then decided against it since I hadn't started it from the beginning. But the hell, here it is.

The Duffer Motel, Mangum, OK

Mangum, Oklahoma

Mangum, Oklahoma. What great little town. Arrived pretty early in the day after a nice leisurely 3 hour drive through the scenic back road, OK 9. After checking in to the only motel in town, but the room was still being cleaned, I stopped for an oil change, I'm at about 3500 miles on the trip, then scoped out downtown Mangum. Well, it's a few blocks, but it's the county seat. A 5 story hotel called the Hotel Franklin caught my eye and I peeked in and loved what I saw. Old lobby, peeling paint, banquet room. This is right up my alley as a photographer. I wandered across the street to the Mangum museum and asked the woman about the hotel. She told me at one time it was the largest building west of the Mississippi and east of the Colorado rivers. Pretty impressive. I told her how I was a photographer and told her about my project that brought me to Mangum. I said I would love to see inside the old hotel and she quickly called someone. Nope, since the mayor and city council weren't in yet. Then magically, her honor walked in. I told her about my project and my interest in the hotel and she quickly handed me the key. Just like that, it was beautiful. No PR people to suck up to, no red tape, just an earnest photographer connecting with a proud small town mayor. I spent the next two hours exploring and documenting the remains. Not too much is left inside and a group recently replaced the windows to prevent further deterioration, but that left cardboard boxes strewn about, but there were still pictures to be made. A lot of nice little details, which I always love. The only drawback of the aside is that by the time I got settled in the motel, it’s pretty late in the day, so I might add another day here. I think it’s a good tradeoff though.

OK

I stopped at the bombing memorial site in Oklahoma City before I left town this morning, the first real tourist thing I've done so far. It's a really beauiful place. Chris and I were there in 2000 before it was completed so it was interesting to see the finished memorial.

1600 N Pennsylvania Ave, Oklahoma City, OK

It's too bad the way the tree sort of obscured the 1600 sign and kept the light off the one side of the house, but oh well. I was camped out in the median of the street which was a little awkward and really, really hot.

When I'm doing these pictures, I was thinking to myself yesterday as I waited for sun to sink lower in the sky, I sort of feel like some sort of modernist architect. I still have to really work out the best language, but I quickly scribbled some notes. From my Chicago architecture tour with Chris earlier this summer, the modernists weren't the most creative people. Their goal was to celebrate the material, the steel mostly, and the space it created. For this project it's sort of similar, I'm celebrating the material, in my case the building I'm photographing. I'm not really exercising much creativity, making simple straight forward documents of the structure. It's about the formality of the subject and no the creativity or vision of the photographer. The vision and creativity lie in the concept.