Last May (2022), Ellen and I rode (I did a lot of pushing) our mountain bikes with five friends for 170 miles down the spine of the San Rafael Swell to Capitol Reef. We convened before the trip in Green River, Utah and camped north of town at Swasey’s Beach, a sandy strand where the river exits Gray Canyon. The wind sandblasted the campground the night before our friends arrived, but we spent time in town before the windstorm buying food at the Melon Vine Food Store, visiting the John Wesley Powell Museum, looking for a good milkshake, and wandering through wide, mostly empty streets in stark sunshine.
Green River was originally a ferry crossing, but now it is known for it's melons, a minor hub for river runners, and a gas stop for people passing by on I-70. While not necessarily depressed, the town isn't thriving. Many older buildings are closed up and vintage hotels are shuttered and posted with no trespassing signs, having lost their business to chain lodging closer to the freeway.
After grocery shopping, I enjoyed photographing nearby in the bright sun, usually less appealing to me than gentler light, but somehow fitting in a stark, scrappy, overexposed desert town. The scenes reminded me of photographers whose work I come back to again and again, Stephen Shore and William Eggleston, pioneers of color images, often of mundane sites, captured in ways that infuse them with meaning. Eudora Welty said of Eggleston’s work that “no subject is fuller of implications than the mundane world,” and perhaps there is truth to that. Shore’s images have been described as “bleak but lyrical” and his style as laconic even though it has a lot to say. Sally Mann, another photographer, says in her excellent memoir "Hold Still", "It is easier for me to take ten good pictures in an airplane bathroom than in the gardens at Versailles."
Photographs draw attention to places that might otherwise be overlooked .
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