Monthly Archive for September, 2009

A look at the sky told us that the sunny days were about to change: thick, dark clouds gathered on the horizon. Later on, thunder rolled in the middle of the night over into echoes in the mountains. When we got up to drive to Lobo the next morning, everything was much darker than usual for the time of the day. During the 15 mile drive the weather rapidly deteriorated towards a heavy storm with flood like rainfalls (which later were hugely dramatized in the tv-news).

So much for “desert”, “dust”, “cactuses”…

We sat there in the dry car waiting for a sign that the bad weather would pass … But it looked like we would be sitting there for quite a while – with nothing to read, with no crossword-puzzles … only Graceland Radio. So we drove back to the motel to check the weather report – which was totally depressing: they were predicting the next sunny day for the day after our departure to Germany. We took refuge at Chuy’s … eating verrry slowly while hopefully and pointlessly peaking outside to see if things were getting better. They were not. We spent the rest of the day educating ourselves through tv-series psychology.

The next morning we anxiously waited from 5 o’clock on at the window of our motel room to check on the weather. It was temporarily dry, but only when the light started to show we knew we probably would get lucky with some rays of sun … We hurried to Lobo for some more musician pictures for Tony while we were waiting for the next hole in the clouds. I really needed the sun to get the one or two shots I felt were missing in “Pink Lobo”. Thankfully the cloud godess was good to me and allowed a little blue hole in the dark blanket that was the sky. Things were looking up. Eventually the hole moved towards the sun and provided the necessary light to finish what I had started. Then we were ready to pack. That night we did not prolong our stay – and the next morning we left for Marfa.

Marfa … It was to be an eye opener for me.

… to be continued

(click here or on the image to see more)

Texas. I never expected to ever go there – at least not after I gave up the thought of becoming an astronaut as a teenager. But all of the sudden there I was with a project in mind and a round trip ahead.
So it goes.

We landed in Dallas Fort Worth International Airport and the place we were aiming at was Lobo, a little ghost town bought by some friends at the very west of the state – right next to the Mexican border. I was planning to make a photography – art – project there and Tony asked me if we could use the chance to make some pictures and video of his newly aquired guitar there too. Also we were in contact with DAH who was trying to see if he could meet us there. So we rented a car and off we drove… to the next motel. It had been a 10, 5 hour flight with 8 hours of time difference between Dallas and Frankfurt and I had not managed to sleep on the plane. After having watched “Star Trek” four times in four different languages on the little seat monitor in front of me, I was now experiencing a massive migraine attack. I took a pain killer, slept for a straight 14 hours and felt a little better afterwards.

So after finally having found our way out of Dallas and onto the correct highway, we were right in Stephen Shore’s La-La Land. Once out of Dallas, things got empty … and deliciously “boring”. Not shortly after that we were to be stopped by our fist police car – many more would follow. I have been driving cars for around twenty years now and was never ever stopped on the open road before – this trip to Texas definitively ruined my beautiful record. So, just to make sure, we asked right at the first time how to best behave when being stopped by the police. After all we just knew the movie versions of that – and they were quite scary – we just did not want to risk reacting wrongly, getting out of the car when not supposed to do so, or staying inside when we should already be laying in the dirt – face down. Of course reality was not that extreme and we had some quite informative conversations with the officers that we were meeting along our way. In Texas police was mostly busy with routine controlling – lots of drug traffic and trespassing was going on due to the close Mexican border. I thought of some essays that were featured on BURN, and I have to admit my stomach did tighten a little …

(click here or on the image to see more)

All of these pictures were taken from the back seat of a car in December 2006 while being driven from Mosocho, a little village on the west of Kenya, to Nairobi, where I was to take my flight back to Europe. We were in a rush to get to Nairobi before sunset, when the streets would get too dangerous, and the world “bumpy” is inadequate to describe the road condition, which was so extreme, that driving next to the road was often the better choice. I was not expecting any of these pictures to turn out as being readable. But I was wrong – thanks to the valent vibration-reduction filter of my little Nikon point&shoot.

This was then the last of three chapters of images (arriving / staying / departing) that I did in Kenya shortly before Christmas 2006. And of all of these it was this last set of images that most excited me. I remember sitting in the plane reviewing the pictures on the monitor and starting to get a strange feeling in my stomach …

A different selection of images was chosen for a little book that came out in color. You can check it out here.
I was not thinking “documentary” back then, thus I have several versions of these images. The original series, of course, which I have archived, but also variations of it in b&w – like the series you see here.

While I mostly only corrected the contrast, I dodged the partially cloudy sky out of some of the images, achieving a more graphical result. I like both results for different reasons and keep them as alternatives.

(click here or on the image to see more)