Highway 90 West of Comstock, Texas
Between the months of January and April of 2017 I roamed Texas sporadically with my old Speed Graphic 4x5 camera and sheets of a small variety of expired Kodak 4x5 color negative and reversal films for what turned out to be 25 days and roughly 5000 miles.
Up into the panhandle, a bit east, central, south, and West Texas. A lonely but fruitful expedition.
111 of the 298 exposures I made would end up being printed in the 2018 book A PLAIN VIEW (the first edition is sold out but a second printing will be available in 2022).
I’d return home to North Texas after a week or so on the road and send whatever sheets of film I’d exposed that outing to the lab and wait for the results. For the most part, the old films held up quite well. But here and there I’d find an issue—light leaks, fogged film, some of the reversal sheets having shifted drastically magenta, which can happen.
And with a few of the unusable exposures being of subjects I wanted to include in the series, I would venture back out in that direction, hoping for a better second result. The vast majority of the photographs in the book are one-time exposures, but where I felt something deserved another chance that didn’t quite work the first time, I’d find the location again and make a new exposure. Thankfully, the additional effort paid off.
On one of these return outings I noticed the location photographed above, which is just off the very beautiful, very desolate Highway 90 in West Texas, on the way to Alpine, Marfa, etc.
My first trip out that way I somehow hadn’t noticed the old gas station and its fallen canopy.
Despite knowing that it had probably been photographed before, and that it was perhaps a bit of a touristy stop, I still found it interesting, and so I made a few exposures of it with two different film types from the angle that can be seen below.
And then before continuing west to remake a photograph or two, I made one exposure from the above angle.
Both the initial and return outings to that region would yield a handful of photographs that would end up in the book.
West Texas is indeed very special, for those who’ve not explored it.
Below is the angle that was printed in the book, along with a few other photographs from that region that were also used.