Pastels

“Be right there.” are the first words we hear her say, though I’m not quite sure where they’re coming from.

Jenny and I seated at our table inside of the diner right along main-street in Holbrook, Arizona. The exterior, though we couldn’t see it from our seats, had been painted a pastel pink. A shade that was surprisingly pervasive throughout the town. But I hadn’t been able to tell if it was due to brighter red tones being faded from the southwestern sun, or if they intentionally chose a color that matched the sandstone surrounding us outside so perfectly.

The interior was decorated with faux wood paneling on the walls and a fabric pattern on the seat backs. When the two were combined with the beige vinyl underneath us, it made for a color palette that at one time was probably described with a word like “pinto”.

I ordered the bacon and eggs, and they were just that, standard diner fair, though the hash browns did leave some room for improvement. I had covered my plate with hot sauce though which generally does a good job of making everything acceptable to eat regardless of the flavor actually embedded during preparation. The waitress, hostess, manager came back up to us,

“I’m just going to leave this here”, she said without making eye contact. Slipping the check underneath my water glass that was already dripping in condensation, soaking the teal and white piece of carbon paper.

It stared back at me, $24.63.

At this point I should have been used to sales tax being applied to everything and making the numbers lose their rounded splendor, but the shock was still there, possibly because it didn’t seem worth it. I pulled out my card and looked at Jenny, “Do we pay here or at the counter?”

“Up there.” She pointed at the register though I could she was no more sure than I was.

Walking to the counter I got my last chance to look at those sitting around us, inside this pink building with it’s layers of veneer on the interior. The man with the varying leg lengths and shoes to correct it staring at the back of the man without capacity to chew with a closed mouth. To my left was a large table, what looked like it could seat a party of 14 and had done so recently. Empty glasses with used silverware and napkins were scattered about.

Some dishes with food scraps had remained as well, perhaps to be picked up when things died down more. Though with only three tables in the restaurant currently I wasn’t sure how much quieter things could really get.

“How was everything?” The waitress, hostess, manager said to us without looking up. Her eyes were instead focused on the rapid clicking of her register, and without skipping a beat or making eye contact she pulled the card from my hand to continue her methodic clicking of the keys.

“It was great” I said, only partially lying.

“Good, good.” She now moved to the credit card processor, typing in another set of numbers pulled from the register itself. $24.63 again.

“If you’d like to leave a tip enter it here” she said as she turned the keypad around to face me this time. I mentioned that we’d left cash on the table, this finally piqued her interest enough to look at us. “Thank you, makes it easier that way, and keeps the government out of things ‘ya know?” I smiled and nodded as if I did.

I pulled a pen from the cup nearby, like most other things in the area it was branded for Route 66. This restaurant, and what I assume are most business in the area don’t have much else to go on. What was once a means to get past this city is now the only reason to stop. Restaurants, hotels, and convenience stores alike all selling a piece of has-been Americana at the low-low price of $3.99 per sticker. It didn’t take long for me to focus back on the task at hand because, this pen, that sticker, the patch hanging from a spinning rack nearby was the same stuff we had seen regularly for the past few days. Each city with their individual claim to fame. A few towns over it was a song from the Eagles playing on repeat from a store across the street.

“Standing on a corner in Winslow Arizona and such a fine sight to see” they sing as a throwaway line in a middle verse of ‘Take it Easy’. We haven’t been in Winslow since yesterday, but there are Winslow bric-a-brac souvenirs here.

I finish my signature on the small piece of thermal paper, and a portion of my money has been left here in Holbrook.

“Have ya’ll seen the movie ‘Cars’?” the waitress, hostess, manager says with more curiosity and interest than she showed throughout our visit, or while discussing the food options.

“Yeah” Jenny and I reply, nearly in unison.

“You know Lizzie and Stanley? The old ones in that town from the movie?” She asks her cadence speeding up as she speaks for what feels like the first time off script.

“Oh yeah” we confirm again, the roles having flipped, with our matched timing that to an outsider would have felt rehearsed.

“Let me show you something” she says pulling out a three-ring binder. You know the kind, black plastic vinyl covering with a clear plastic overlay adhered on 3 sides so you could write “Chemistry, Mr. Brown” on a piece of paper and slip it inside. To those looking at it behind the register it must have seemed like a repository of financial statements and business documentation. Yet from her facial expressions it was clear that this was her way of letting us in.

“They were based off my parents, Lizzie and Stanley were. Disney came here and sat right at this table,” she said pointing to one of the booths near where we sat. “And this,” she said pointing at a photo in the binder, “this is my grandma with the animator. He brought his daughter in that day

and they ate here before heading out down Route 66 for inspiration. They came around a lot, were here for weeks, really trying to capture everything about the area.”

She watched us closely as we stood there, flipping through the pages of this handmade photo album. Occasionally I’d look up at her, she was smiling now as we looked at the hundreds of pre-production images of the film, and her family. I was unsure of what else to say, my mouth suddenly dry and without a thought crossing past. And I feel like shit for all the little complaints I’d made up to this moment.

The silence was suddenly broken by a simple “If you’re looking for something else to do, the town museum is right around the corner. It’s run by the historical society. Free entry too. They’ve got all sorts of displays in there, some really neat stuff. I think you can even go and sit in the old county judge seat as it used to be the courthouse before they built the new one up on 2nd street.”

I realized the logo pen was still sitting between my index and middle fingers twirling back and forth, we all have somewhere to be.

“Thank you” I said, “We’ll go check that out.” and we walked out the door. Leaving behind the fake wood paneling and pastel exterior paint. The dishes sitting on that large table nearby, and the man with the different sized legs who was still slurping down his egg soaked hash browns. The imported stickers and patches that desperately wanted to be a part of this piece of America.

Our waitress, hostess, manager, storyteller.

Rimrock Oysters

It’s nearly eleven in the morning at the Rimrock Grocery Store located unsurprisingly in Rimrock Washington. To say it’s a grocery’s the same kind of store you’ve undoubtably seen scattered across the landscape, located in the towns between towns. Where inside you’ll find photographs of hunters pinned to the walls and a sign that reads plainly, “Defend the 2nd amendment. Defender of the rest”. The groceries stocked aren’t from a supplier, but instead the owner takes a trip to another nearby chain grocery store to buy a few things and re-price them back here. Not an illegal, or even immoral business model. And it works well enough supporting campers who pass through in the summer. Or in our case, kicking off the next 48 hours in the Washington backcountry. This is the meeting point, where following a post on the US based Delica Forum (the other, more popular sites are all for the UK or Canada) Roland, the founder of Delicas Northwest and organizer of this metope has intended for everyone to come. But it’s nearly eleven, and no one else has come to join us.

Roland, his girlfriend Cara, and their six month old Australian Shepherd, Moss met up with us the night prior. We had intended to meet a few minutes up the road at the Indian Creek Campground. But it just so happened that as I was walking out of the gas station bathroom in Packwood the night prior, they were pulling in. The coincidence was a good one. The Delica I was in alongside Ben, and his 2 year old Doberman, Miles was running late. We had planned to get in to the campground around seven that night, even with daylight savings still in effect it would have been long dark. But it was now nearly nine, an hour and a half after Roland was supposed to arrive. And getting to an empty campground would have left me unsettled. 

This wasn’t my first time meeting Roland. We’d first met about a month ago at Descend on Bend. A gathering of vans in central Oregon that I’ve heard referred to as “Burning Van”. Weather that is said with love or distain I wasn’t able to figure out, but since then we’d met one other time just three weeks earlier right down the road as we kicked off another camping trip on another section of the Washington Backroads Discovery Route. That’s what we were here for. The 575 mile long series of forest roads connected by the occasional two-lane highway or Rimrock-sized town reached from the Oregon border at White Salmon and winds its way Northeast to the Canadian border. Roland’s previous expedition was more or less successful than this one was shaping up to be, depending on how you measure achievements on the WABDR.

The first trip through this route we had a total of nine Delicas throughout the weekend. Impressive in many regards, but most of all was the centralizing of community. That was an aspect of Delica ownership that I hadn’t, and still have not come to grips with. In past lives of owning Volkswagen’s and Subaru’s, community and those who live and die by the emblem on their hood is the norm. Delica owners fall in to other subsets of enthusiasm though. You have your #vanlife groups who are using the Delica as a vessel to visit national parks and enjoy life. There are those who purchase it because of it’s unique-ness in the world of Japanese imports. Bridging the right hand drive and boxy designs of the 80s stateside. And lastly you have those who buy them for offloading, or overloading as it has become more popularly known as in recent years. And with such a fractured community, getting the word out to all these groups proves to be a hard task. But the route we would take this first time only skimmed portions of the first section of the WABDR. From Packwood we would head southwest, jumping on and off the trail as needed to reach our determined campsites and viewpoints. But weather you look at these events from the lens of challenge or community, success is a matter the quality of time spent. And to better do that, enter Delicas Northwest. Started in 2017 as a way to get owners together, Roland has since taken on liaison for the Pacific Northwest Community. Socializing and planning events to make sure no one gets lost along the way, or can meet up with the group at any point, he had identified three campgrounds for the night prior just incase the first two options were full. Incredibly unlikely when it’s November and you’re sitting 6,000’ in to the mountains of Washington, but that level of preparedness was something we had grown accustomed to. 

So as we sat in the small parking lot of the Rimrock Grocery Store, the lack of other vans wasn’t a question of, “Did someone get lost?” but instead, “Are we the only ones dumb enough to do something like this?”. Eleven rolls around and I stare up at the grocery store sign standing tall in the trees. “Oysters” it offers proudly as the first thing you can purchase there, and I begin to answer my own question.

The Taxonomy of a Title

This essay has been written as a pre-text to a yet to be released mixed-media series.

My images, like the images of others are shared regularly on social media. What outlet this has been has changed over time, moving from network to network like water following the path of least resistance. But regardless of specifics, the underlying requirement to include a title for each image posted as if it were a caption persevered. These snippets of text were designed to be brief, though never implied that it was for a true photo title. The options were left ambiguous to the poster, leading to a tree of options with no incorrect answer. The opportunity to represent yourself in brevity or length as you describe your day, inspiration, or anecdote was seen as a welcome contextual requirement that allowed you to reach your viewer as if you were standing next to them.

However, despite my photographs conforming to these standards, the true titles each one carries are blank; or “untitled” per the artistic community. While this would seem to imply that any titles my images do carry are falsehoods, I think it’s more important to make the distinction between captions and titles, and how they can often be seen as a single object despite their varied intent. Through this, we can also establish the meaning behind a title and its origin as it matters within modern documentarian photography.

I should note, that the style of photography I am referring to is not one that in any other circumstance would dance around. This new form of capture as defined since the 1970s and curated into the 2000s seeks to return image capture to a natural state, preserving moment and intent as the subjects exist without exposition. As a category, it crosses styles that were once previously silo’d. Street, portraiture, still life. All seen separately until within the last few years where they could come together with the intent to prove truth and the need for archiving moments of rapid change. Within this style, the need for definition of what an image title is and means becomes less of a requirement. This can be framed in the context of separating the requirements needed to be a title or caption. In a digital age where comment is desired from both the self and the viewer, the caption has superseded the title for single images and begs the question, in retrospective viewings, does the caption take the place of the title? And if so, do we find the need to title photographs diminishing as their role in influencing the viewers own answers about the piece vanishes?

This relationship of title and answer has seen a slow erosion through the same social networks I’ve shared images through. As individual photographs are placed before the viewer, there is an inability to account for what comes next and the what the story constructed through consecutive photographs will be. That is to say, without the ability to know who, or what photo will appear in a feed due to algorithmic displays based on posting frequency and assumed viewer interaction, the weight carried by claiming a specific image title is non-existant. Each piece of text, be it caption or title, only masks the true name of any given piece of art: which is “untitled”.

A rejection of naming works is a return to the earliest instances of art itself. As Ruth Bernard Yeazell writes in her article “The Art That Has No Name”,

    “For the vast majority of European paintings before the eighteenth century, the absence of a title testified not to a deliberate refusal of prevailing custom but to the default condition of artistic practice.”

As modern documentarian photography seeks a return to the fundamental understanding of image capture as a recreation of singular moments for the purposes of statement and record keeping, it understandably finds roots within early works of art that do not seek to be labeled as their subject presents the inherent title within the image itself. Yeazell continues,

    “Yet to the degree that such images originated in commissions rather than the open market—as did most Italian painting before the eighteenth century—they, too, were often designed for a particular space, where most viewers could be expected to recognize what they were seeing. The person who worshipped at the altar of a local church or chapel, the family and friends afforded access to the private quarters of a nobleman: such viewers could rely on a common culture and informal means of exchange to identify the images before them.”

This is the goal of the photographer. Presenting this as they should be, with a title to match. And while there is a clear way to title a photograph based on the instinct of either the viewer or the self (note these titles may not be identical, but may both still be correct), qualifying this has proven to be a challenge. But that's not to say impossible, and through the study of countless personal and third party photographs, I've created a system that has allowed me to take steps forward in within my (currently titled) series 20 photographs

Once, while at a gallery I heard a story of Robert Frank, in which wanting the gallery to host his images, but not having the desire to print and supply the photographs himself. He simply sent along the negatives to the curator with a note that read, "Make yourself some prints". To Frank it was not important that he be present to work with the images. Only that the images existed and could speak for themselves. It's important to note here that Frank was vehemently against titles and words surrounding works. This method and understanding that presence should not be a requirement is the backbone of this naming structure.

Segmented into three parts, the Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary, this naming structure holds true for all of my images past, present, and future. Built on language and sentence structure, there are only 6 potential combinations for a title using the 3 components. It can be stated that at any point in time this system can be referenced to apply both context, and my own clear intent behind the capture of an image regardless of if I am there to answer it myself.

I've purposefully left out graphic aids and example images as it would go against the intent of the naming structure.

The Primary, as a starting point, is the easiest to define. Always a noun, it is what the viewer's eye is first drawn to as you look at a photo. It is a fundamental component in deciphering artwork, and in our earliest art classes during grade school what would be used as an introductory question as we look to simply deconstruct an artwork before we apply any context or try to discern what the artist intended as they completed their works. The easiest way to know the primary of a photograph is to answer a question posed to yourself, "This is a photo of a ___", where the blank is a single word answer in the simplest of terms. Large hotel would become hotel, Ford F-150 would be Pickup, Truck, or even simpler, Car. It is not up to the primary to describe anything outside of what we first lay our eyes on, that falls entirely on the remaining two components.

The Secondary, sees splits in where it can take the viewer. As a component, it's most simply realized as the action the Primary takes, or the second descriptor required to differentiate it from another potentially similar image. If the photo is a portrait, we can assume the Primary is a name or similar focused descriptor. Then we determine what the subject is doing. Smiling, sad, happy. Alternately, if the Primary is less focused and instead relies on a more vague descriptor, the Secondary may then need to be another noun in order to account for the lack of information available. With this pathway, we may see then a Primary of "Woman", with the Secondary being "Dress" to further clarify the description of a subject.

The Tertiary exists as the only optional component of this structure. If the photo has been defined sufficiently from the Primary and Secondary alone, no further descriptors are needed. However, as a library of images expands the requirement for inclusion may find itself worked into the fabric of naming taxonomy. It is also the most complicated, with four potential pathways to be used depending on the use of the Secondary. If the Secondary was a verb, the Tertiary will almost certainly be an adjective. However, if the Secondary was a second noun, we see the Tertiary open up to be either a noun, verb, or adjective.

This optional step provides the most variety and choice within an image title. It can be used as a date to differentiate between the same subject at two points in time (Hotel - Abandoned, 2013 vs. Hotel - In Use, 2018) in which the building, a Hotel, was re-occupied at some point during the four year gap between images. It can also be the action of the two descriptive objects (Hotel - Window, Open), or the last descriptor required to ensure there is clarity of the image itself (Hotel - Room, Large). 

The requirements for a clear Taxonomy of names stems from the requirement to lead the viewer through a collection without direct interaction from the self. By presenting images that share no information outside of what is already visible and clearly understood by the viewer, there is an impartiality that can be applied that exists beyond "untitled" as a title. Returning to Yeazell's piece,

"Under modern circumstances of display and reproduction, in fact, Untitled, too, is a kind of title: a word that routinely accompanies the work as it circulates in the culture and that instructs us, if only by negation, how to view it."

This impartiality created through naming allows the viewer to work their way through the body of work unobstructed, something that modern photo sharing rarely allows in a truly uninhibited manner. And as documentarian photography continues to reject modernity through the falsified presentation of images and the means by which they are captured, the need for the photographer to step away is greater than ever.