Photo by Raymond Molinar, Galveston, TX, November 2020

It’s a wonderful thing, photography.

As I’ve written about in previous journal entries here on my site, I started making photographs from the road in 2006.

I’d been making photographs in a studio setting for about four years before that, but once I’d had enough of my time confined but certainly satisfied with all I’d been learning, it began to make sense the idea of bringing the cameras out on the road.

And I’d do just that, sometime in 2006, with my old 8x10 Century Universal field camera and a handful of boxes of color and black-and-white 8x10 Polaroid films - I’d been using the big Polaroid films in the studio and thought it might be interesting to use them outside in natural settings. I was hooked.

And since then, and while never having looked back, the amount of miles I’ve covered by car are uncountable, as are the exposures I’ve made along the way. It’s amazing what happens when one finds the direction in which they ought to be moving.

There’s just something about being on the road, something almost indescribable, cameras and film in the back seat, music playing, unsure of what lay around one corner to the next but open to whatever it may be. A kind of invigoration lives there.

As photographer Henry Wessel put it, photographing “has to do with the discipline of being receptive. It is a physical sensation. You are not looking for something. You are open, receptive. At some point you are in front of something that you cannot ignore.”

So very true.

While most of my exposures from the road have been made west of the Mississippi, I’ve had the pleasure of making a few photographs in other places, as well - New York City and State, New Orleans, Florida.

But many trips back and forth between California and Texas over the years, and some up to Oregon. Still so much of America to explore, but what I’ve been able to see and document thus far has been an absolute treat.

And now I’m happy to include photographs from Galveston, Texas, to my growing collection of American photographs.

Between the months of January and April of 2017 I roamed Texas sporadically with my old Speed Graphic 4x5 camera for what turned out to be 25 days and roughly 5000 miles. I’d moved to Texas just two years prior and thought it only made sense to see more of the big state than I’d seen before as a visiting photographer. And so I did. Up into the Panhandle, a bit east, central, south, and West Texas. 111 of the 298 exposures I made would end up being printed in the 2018 book A PLAIN VIEW. But no matter how many miles and real estate I’d covered on those travels, I never thought to make it far enough south to meet Galveston. And then, perhaps ironically, Galveston Historical Foundation contacted me in May of 2020 to see if I might like to extend my “Texas series” by making photographs in Galveston for a book to be published on the occasion of the foundation’s 2021 sesquicentennial. I was happy to accept the offer, as perhaps the whole of my Texas story had yet to be completed. And so that November I drove my car from Los Angeles, where I was living once more, to Galveston with my cameras, in the passenger seat my friend and fellow photographer Raymond Molinar who would assist me in my efforts to document as strange and beautiful a land as I’d ever seen while also making not only behind-the-scenes photographs of my process but his own photographs of this remarkably standstill place. An invigorating experience. And one that left me with a book that I’m quite fond of—indeed a companion of sorts to the mainland Texas photographs before it.

Preorder a copy HERE.

A few frames from Galveston: