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• photography

  Texas to Tucson

  1 Comment

  Photographs of my move from Austin, Texas to Tucson, Arizona.

  
  80 mph speed limit on IH-10 near Junction

  
  Panorama between Junction and Sonora

  
  Driver’s seat

  
  Traveling companion: my dog, Belacqua

  
  Ranch Style Dog at a rest stop outside Sonora

  
  Talisman

  

  
  West Texas wind farms

  
  Travelworn

  
  Vintage tiles in the Holland Hotel bathroom,  Alpine, Texas

  

  
  Biergarten, Holland Hotel

  
  Eidelweiss Brewery in the Holland Hotel

  
  Storm ahead, Alpine

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
  Alpine vignettes

  
  Journey

  
  Railroad warehouse

  

  
  Alpine walk continued
  
  Cantínflas window, Alpine

  
  Last laugh

  
  Cerrado

  
  Britney Spears stencil

  
  Texas window #1

  
  Open window

  
  Train romance

  
  Step on a crack

  

  

  
  Downtown scenes

  
  Tea and taxes

  
  Doorway

  
  Footprints

  
  Storage for all your plastic elephant needs

  
  Texas window #2

  
  Shoot first… ask questions later

  
  Alley

  
  Vintage sign made in Chicago, Holland Hotel

  
  Storm cloud ablaze

  
  Alpine.

  
  Theater in renovation

  
  Suspended

  
  Hanging vines

  
  Rangra Theater

  
  Our Lady of Peace

  
  Alpine vista

  
  Art deco freize

  
  The big O’s

  
  The loneliest road: Hwy. 67 between Marfa and Valentine

  
  View towards the Rio Grande, Las Cruces, New Mexico

  

  
  Views from Lodge on the Desert, Las Cruces

  

  

  

  
  Afternoon on the terrace at Lodge on the Desert

  
  Dust cloud, New Mexico-Arizona border

  
  Morning, new home in Tucson

• photography, life, observations

  Galveston

  Comment?

  Galveston is just about one of my favorite damn places in the world. It’s a place of bizarre beauty, shocking decay, bright colors and nearly all forms of decadence. I’ve been going there for the last 10 years every 4th of July weekend for an extended family reunion at a shorefront hotel. Long-overdue relaxation on beach is almost too good to get away from sometimes; swimming in the bathtub-warm Gulf water is also one of my favorite things in this world. Some years it’s impossible to tear myself away, and frankly too hot, to go for a walk and take photos of one of the most unique downtown areas in the U.S. Galveston was the (long e) premiere cosmopolitan city from about the post-Civil War era through the 1950’s, as the main shipping and exporting port and cultural center of the vast state, till the oil wealth of Houston overtook it, and other cities matured their own industries by the 60’s. Today, it’s an impoverished town with a tourist facade. But there’s an immense wealth of historic industrial, retail, cultural and residential architecture, all inspired by the golden industrial age of the early 1900’s and the flamboyance of seaside flora – all largely empty or in a sad state of repair. While I find something fascinating on about every square inch of every house or building, I also feel that worrying about capturing the moment on film, or should I say pixels, ruins it. Nature, history, economics and architecture: you can see why I enjoy this town so much.

  I happened to have time for a downtown walk as I went in search of good coffee one morning (I found it at Mod Coffeehouse on Postoffice Street). This was the perfect time to go: very little street or pedestrian traffic, and tolerable weather before the sun had thoroughly steamed the humid air.

  
  Old Hotel

  
  The Past Is Present

  
  Industrial Decay

  
  Envelope Slot

  
  Galveston Electric Company

  
  Industrial Decay

  
  Empty

  
  Martini Theater

  
  Sea

  
  Bougainvillea Morning

  
  door to…

  
  O’Malley’s Irish Pub

  
  Apartment foyer at night

  
  R 1/2 Street

  
  Smile… you’re in the ghetto!

  
  Mailbox

  
  Sculpture Garden
  

   
  Seaside Motel

• photography, www, ideas

  Photography & Reality

  Comment?

  There are things that photograph well but aren’t that impressive in real life.

  - Pre-framed/matted Art prints sold at big box stores. I can imagine that some of these actually look like craigslist submissions.

  - Creatively displayed but poorly executed art installations. It bothers me that the mere presentation of something can make up for lack of substance and quality. Yet in saying this I point the finger of blame at myself, a graphic designer/marketing geek/art installer. Because what’s fun and interesting to me about my work is that you can control people’s expectations and impressions of things. When you do that, you can influence reality a great deal. One could completely power trip off of it, but when you work with clients in the real world, you must often bend to their will and accommodate their quirks and foibles. Make them look good, but compromise.

  - Street fashion. I’m kind of glad last year’s silliness and excess is going away a little bit. It’s still there but it’s being drawn back into practicality. My fashion philosophy is combining function AND expression.

  - Outdoor weddings.

  - Non-pap shots of celebrities.

  - Giant interstate highway mixmasters.

  And there are beautiful things in real life that underwhelm when photographed. Maybe most things are like this. Sunsets, people, black clothes and rose bushes come to mind. What are your ideas?

  ***

  As a child, I adored looking at the impeccably decorated interiors and lush, expansive gardens featured in my mom’s Southern Living and Better Homes & Gardens (this was in the days before Martha Stewart). I’d linger on every photo, picturing myself living in each one: cooking for guests in the (futu)rustic kitchen at my country manse, soaking in a big Roman tub with the sun streaming in through the retractable skylight in my alabaster bathroom, coming home to the white noise of my mid-century modern loft in the heart of a bustling city, sitting on a stone bench contemplating my lotus-covered water garden, walking under my fragrant rose arbor, etc.

  Now in addition to lingering on paper, we can also linger on pixels. There’s an ever-growing number of websites, blogs and Flickr groups that enable users to easily share photos of one’s home online. The lighting, the placement of objects, and the lack of personal knick-knacks in some scenes look as though they were styled and shot by professionals. The controlled environment of the photograph is deceptive, yet as we live more and more of our real, public lives on the web, it’s easy to confuse this illusion as reality. One begins to see one’s clothes and home - intimate expressions of self - as a scene in a photograph. How unsettling to be a voyeur in your own life.

• photography, portrait, women, style

  Alter Ego

  Comment?

  I was invited to be in an art show called Alter Ego. For several months, I’ve had the idea to do some art/fashion portraits of the regular characters I inhabit in the theater of my head. I wanted to show the inner alter egos we all have, how we see ourselves in fantasies, daydreams, and also the male/female anatomy that makes up our psyche that may go unacknowledged. I don’t really express either persona on the outside at all, but maybe things do come out slightly and don’t get fully explained in my words or actions. This show gave me an opportunity to execute these ideas. There was one character I missed but I hadn’t quite thought her out yet, and I didn’t have the right outfit on hand anyways. Everything is completely self-styled, self-shot, and the shirts in both photos are my creations. These photos are amateurish, I know, but I think this gives them an intimate, honest and immediate feel.

  

  Alter Ego I (if I were a guy)
  May 2008
  18″ x 24″ print

  Most of the time I’m not a girly-girl. I call people “man” a lot. I feel more comfortable having male friends than female friends. And I wonder from time to time what it’d be like to be a guy. How would I look? How would I carry myself? Walk? Stand? How would I dress? Would I be considered good-looking or dorky or ugly? I was trying to think of all the guys I know and how they stand and position their arms, necks, shoulders… body language. It was actually physically uncomfortable to stand like a man. I had to mentally push my hips and butt out of the way, and the awkwardness showed in the shots where I was standing. Although I think my choice of pants had something to do with that - they needed to be looser and more concealing of curves. Here I look like a cross between my dad and my uncle (on my mom’s side). It’s weird. Closeup of the shirt is here.

  

  Alter Ego II (the diva)
  May 2008
  18″ x 24″ print

  This is the Diva. Dramatic, eccentric, elegant, bold, aloof one second, loud the next, ultra feminine. I like how the makeup came out. Operatic (female) but also drag queen (male). Detail of self-made shirt here.

  Basic Self/Test Shot

  

  Outtakes

  

  

  

  I’ve been thinking about a shoot like this since last fall, and especially had the idea to wear a small hat or beehive hairdo thrust towards the forehead, but had neither the hat nor hair to do so. Also working against too little time & too much humidity in my non-climate-controlled studio.

• photography, style, observations

  Ft. Worth Foray

  Comment?

  As a working stiff, I don’t get no Spring Break, but I took a short one nonetheless. I didn’t take any furloughs during the busy seasons of last spring and fall wound up feeling ruined and depressed by Memorial Day/Christmas. A couple injections of sxsw chaos and a jaunt up to visit family in Cowtown were just what was needed.

  Of course, I didn’t miss an opportunity to visit Ft. Worth’s museum district on a bright, cool spring afternoon. I always visit the Kimball, even if I don’t know what the exhibition is, it’s just a wonderful space. The current exhibit, Picturing the Bible: The Earliest Christian Art was extremely crowded (perhaps because DFW is the buckle of the Bible Belt) and mostly consisted of small objects like rings, glass and metal works, so it was difficult to get a close look at many pieces, and thus contemplate on them. The most interesting items to me were the carved stone sarcophagi and painted tombs with the names and exact ages of the deceased and touching, personal epitaphs written by husbands, wives, parents and friends.

  Also intimate was the excellent The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888–1979 down the sidewalk at the Amon Carter Museum. Some of the earliest images were people photographing themselves myspace style, which shows this narcissism of the Millenials is nothing new. My favorite part of this exhibit were the autochrome photographs from the very early 20th century, a process which allowed the actual color of the object to be recorded onto the plate, rather than by post-process coloration. Hairstyles and outfits we associate completely in black-and-white sprung to life: what would’ve been a rather unremarkable picture of a young man sitting in a chair soared to fashion-plate level when the color version revealed him to be dandily dressed in a lime green shirt, lavender tie, green pants, green socks and white leather shoes.

  Unfortunately, because it was late in the day, I missed Intimate Modernism: Fort Worth Circle Artists in the 1940s and Martin Puryear the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

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art diva studios is the home of art, design and commentary by Rachelle Díaz, whose un-pidgeonhole-able aesthetic and amorphous disposition is often mistaken for something else. Instead of dividing her online presence into "art," "design," and "commentary", she classified all three forms into the Common Threads below. This website is best viewed in Firefox.

Recent Shenanigans

• milagros
• Sugar-Power-Women
• love/hate
• Texas to Tucson
• DJ JC
• US
• Diskovery
• Galveston
• Me!Me!
• Sweat[shirt]er