Another image from King Monkey and the Infinite Sunshine made it into a group exhibition. This time in Fort Collins, CO at the Center for Fine Art Photography (link) for their upcoming “Simply” exhibition.

In the Alps
facemounted chromogenic print
30″ x 30″

Two of my images were selected for an upcoming group exhibition at Gallery27 in Santa Barbara. The show is called “THE PATH” (link).

Here are the pieces:

Mexican Path
facemounted chromogenic print
20″ x 20″

Nevitian Path
facemounted chromogenic print
20″ x 20″

Almost exactly one year ago I was standing on these train tracks in the early hours of the day in San Miguel de Allende in central Mexico, a beautiful cobblestone town in the heart of Mexico with lots of little cafés, bars and galleries and rooftop restaurants. I was there for ten days and early into the trip found out about the history this town shared with the Beat Generation writers and fore figures. Particularly Neal Cassady who had passed away there in 1968. Cassady being the inspiration to countless stories, most famously as the character Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. This was sensational!

I had read On the Road for the first time when I was about fifteen or sixteen and it has been with me ever since. I see Kerouac as part of why I chose to change continents and move from Germany to California. And here I was in the town in which, as the myth has it, Kerouac and Cassady drove around in a green Mercedes with a naked girl called Sunshine in the backseat.

I started doing some research and discovered that Cassady had supposedly attended a wedding party near the train station in February of 1968 and after leaving the party decided to walk the tracks south towards the town of Celaya only dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. He only made it about two hundred feet down the tracks and some workers found him in the morning in a coma. The cold night, it was February at an elevation of about 6000 feet, must have got him and he died in a nearby hospital hours later.

So one morning I got up early and took a cab down to the train station. The cab drivers name was David and he was very excited when I told him that this was my second name. He barely spoke English and I had close to zero Spanish for him. He told me his son was a mechanic in town, repairing suspension. I pointed at the cobblestone roads and replied: “Perfect job!” Now David was really entertained. His daughter, he kept explaining, was living in Modesto, in California and she was going to school there for something I forgot but he insured me that she was very smart. We drove down Canal Street towards the train station, Sunshine was peeking over the mountains and I was on my way to look for a dead man around the train tracks at the outskirts of this Mexican little town that had seen so much of what I had been exposed to in writing.

I asked David to wait for me for thirty minutes while I was looking for Cassady. I walked down to and past the old train station, crossed the road which was intersecting with the tracks and walked south. Right around two hundred feet from the train station Sunshine was peeking over the hills and shacks and there Cassady was. He said hello and told me to keep wandering. I acknowledged and we both turned to continue on our path.

David was sitting in the cab. “Go now?” “Yes,” I said and the engine started. David wanted to show me the best view of San Miguel on the way back so we drove into the hills off Canal to the north. We stopped and looked east. I believed him that this was a magnificent view for sunset but at this time of the day Sunshine was blinding us and we kept driving. I asked him to drop me off at Bar LaCucaracha and smiling he agreed.

I was on Nevis recently and went for the same hike that inspired me to do “King Monkey and the Infinite Sunshine”. This year the path was completely overgrown and I had to climb through foliage for a while. This picture was taken right when I was starting to wonder if I shall continue, it is the path that I was traveling on. Spinning 360 degrees my view was exactly the same.

Santiago

Santiago, Chile. Just days before the major earthquake of 8.8 magnitude that hit about 200 kilometers south of the city and made me think that I had seen my last sunrise. This image says “Compression” to me. The distance between the bushes and the building is rather large and the fact that one can see into the building, limited by this two-dimensional facade of glass, hints at the depth this scene has while being void of it in the photograph.

Silvretta Staudamm

The Silvretta Staudamm in Vorarlberg, Austria. I have been coming here since I was a little kid and it is always nice to revisit. The stormy (and rainy) weather made us wonder if we should do the full hike around the lake but we decided to go for it and it turned out to be the right choice. Fast moving cloud formations and fog made for dramatic scenes…