Revisiting an image from a walk in San Antonio.
A while back I was in San Antonio for no particular reason. I was walking around the downtown area with a Leica Q2 enjoying a bright, cool afternoon and looking for interesting things to photograph. I used to visit San Antonio more frequently when my parents were still alive because they provided a good reason to make the trip down. I could hang with them for a while at the "ancestral" house to catch up on family news and then, when the conversation drifted off, I'd head downtown for a look around. For a couple of years after my father passed away I really didn't have the desire to go back. With both parents gone and their house emptied out and sold it seemed like some of the tentacles that attached me to the place had disappeared. The magnets were losing their charge.
I'd go back for business reasons and B. and I would head down for major holidays to see her family but my old San Antonio just wasn't the same. At least it wasn't the same for me.
San Antonio grew up. I grew up. Everything changed. I shot my first cookbook, for Texas Monthly, mostly in San Antonio. My early street photographs, on Kodachrome 64, were taken on the streets of San Antonio --- during Fiestas. My first black and white "girlfriend" photographs were done in my old neighborhood there. On her back porch. It was my "coming of age" city, in many ways.
It used to be grittier, cheaper, more tawdry and authentic. More dangerous and more fun. And I'm certain parts of the city are still "charming" in that fashion. But those are parts of the city that seem inaccessible to me now. I don't fit anymore.
One Saturday morning in early February of this year I woke up feeling a vague desire to get out of Austin and go someplace that was easy to walk through, easy to photograph in, and just easy to exist in. I pointed my car South and an hour later ended up parking three or four blocks from the Alamo. I spent the day walking through the main streets of Commerce and Houston mostly marveling at how much had changed and how carefully aimed at the tourists so many of the rehabilitated venues were. But equally amazed that so many buildings further towards El Mercado (The Market) were still standing and still playing host to vaguely sinister businesses like pawn shops and "finance" companies. Beauty parlors and dangerous looking bars that seemed to cater to local day drinkers.
I came down to walk and look at least as much as I came thinking I might find great shots. Or even good shots. It might be my imagination but back in the 1970s and 1980s people were slender, healthier, and because they had definition they had innate style. Now everyone looked like a potato. Potatoes with legs and arms. Gone were the dark, alluring young woman carefully navigating the uneven sidewalks on stiletto heels, replaced by woman in extra, extra large black tights and odd but colorful track shoes. And now covered with tattoos. And men who've become even more ponderously huge.
The hand painted signs that used to dot the shops along the streets replaced by TV screens and monitors with ever changing marketing programming and bad graphics. And burglar bars and surveillance cameras.
As I walked through the city I was hit with a wave of sadness. So much had changed but what resulted was a homogenized vision of tourism for people who couldn't afford to load their families into airplanes for exciting trips to far off places; instead the city had become a magnet for people who could drive in and spend the day looking for attractions like, the RiverCity Mall or a Wax Museum filled with second tier rock stars and soap opera divas. Like P.T. Barnum's Exciting Museum of thrilling crap from horror movies. And countless identical "Tex-Mex" restaurants serving greasy tortilla chips and cheap margaritas.
None of it seemed particularly interesting or photo worthy but I shot it all anyway because, I guess, that's what I do. I looked at the folder today, saved the photo above and tossed the other couple hundred images. I mean, at a certain aesthetic level, what's the point?
I met my older brother and his wife at the end of the day at a restaurant out on the 410 Loop road. It was a restaurant that had been in our old neighborhood when we were kids in high school. The original lost its lease and relocated a couple of times until they ended up on the periphery of a nice, old patrician neighborhood called, Alamo Heights. The menu has persevered over all the relocations and the passage of time. New owners leveraging gustatory nostalgia with decent food and newer decor. But still the same good margaritas and very nice salsa. And the older ladies with blue hair.
My brother asked me, in passing, what I'd been photographing that day. I answered vaguely that downtown had always interested me and I came down with a camera because I wanted to see what had changed. He asked me what had changed. I responded: "Not much. And everything. But mostly me." The topics moved on to kids, investments, health care, and all the usual stuff. We said goodbye in the parking lot and I headed back in the dark. Down a ribbon of highway that I've traversed in both directions maybe a thousand times. Maybe more. Usually with a Nikon or a Leica keeping me company on the front seat.
For some reason that night I remembered my first trip alone from San Antonio to Austin. It was in a big, brown Chevy Biscayne (the poor man's Impala). The car was a 1970. The year I drove it up was 1973. It had no air conditioning. It wasn't that the car's air conditioning was broken it was because my parents were so frugal they just didn't see the point of buying an air conditioned car in Texas... Interesting times. Interesting family. We never owned a color TV either. I think I bought my first color television after I worked in advertising for about three years. I only bought it because I needed to watch the commercials we were producing back then. There never was much else on.
Anyway, the old cars were fun to drive. They were big and sloppy and all over the road. The Biscayne had the standard GM 350 cubic inch V-8 and vinyl bench seats and I'm pretty sure I made that first trip alone because nobody else really wanted to spend a hour on the road without air conditioning. With the back of their legs sticking to the plastic seats.
Now that I write all this down I remember that the second two cars I bought for myself had no air conditioning. One was a white VW bug I bought for $800 and drove for years. The other was a Chevy half ton pick-up truck with a three speed stick on the steering column. Also not air conditioned. Crazy choices for a state that bakes more often than it chills.
I drove an art director who came down from Harrisburg, PA. all over Louisiana one Summer, shooting historic plantations and showcase, restored "antique" homes. And food. All for Early American Life Magazine. We stopped frequently to buy ice for the ice chest that road in the back with the gear. And the 4x5 sheet film. And the boxes of Polaroid test materials. My first long job with a 4x5 camera...
I had the VW bug when I got hired to drive all over Texas for Texas Monthly Press to shoot their cookbook, Creative Mexican Cooking, by Anne Lindsay Greer. Ms Greer would decide on the restaurants and I'd meet her at the location. I had all my photo gear in two plastic milk crates and, as I mentioned, no A/C. The only time it was almost a disaster was the time I had to head up to Dallas in August to photograph at the very, very tony Mansion on Turtle Creek. ( they did ask me to park the car in the back. In the staff parking lot... it was not valet-able).
The shoot went well. The book did well. But I remember most trying to get out of Dallas and back to Austin at rush hour on a Friday with a massive traffic jam and me stuck right in the middle of it with my hot little car, and hearing on the A.M. radio that it was 107 real degrees (not "feels like" ) that afternoon. Traffic moved slowly. And then not at all. And then slowly some more. And while I sweated like a glass of frigid beer in a sauna my real worry was the shot film cooking in the back seat. I stopped for gas and spent my last seventy five cents on a five pound bag of ice to cover the shot film. Desperate times.
So many memories come to the fore when you are motoring North towards home.
I liked the guy in the portrait above. He was heading into a workshop about portraits right there on Houston St. when he spied me walking along with my Q2. He stopped me to ask about it and thought, maybe, that I was coming to the workshop. He was open to being photographed. It was a nice moment.
It made the trip a bit more rewarding.
I often get asked, here and in other places, why I'm not jetting around the world to all the old cliché places like Rome and Paris to try and make photographs like I did when I was in those cities in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. And I have to answer that those days are gone. The cities have changed and I have changed. Once upon a time on any October day you could walk up to the Louvre, pay your three dollars and stroll right in. It was a time pre-pyramid. A time when there were scant tourists after labor day. When the people in Paris looked profoundly different than people in Rome or Austin or NYC.
Now you might as well go to Disney World. Either way you'll spend your time in the Summer waiting in long lines and paying through the nose for the privilege. And part of the privilege is being surrounded by Americans on vacation. A sore spot for the locals in almost every regard.
A dour day here at VSL.. GZA....for no reason whatsoever. Nothing's gone wrong. It's just the dystopian ennui of an older than average photographer stuck in a wheel of unrelenting change. And very little of it much good.
At least we have the mannequins...
