Armless Doll. Abandoned Hovel. Columbus, New Mexico.

This tiny vile hard by the borderline became Ground Zero for serious gun fights between the drug cartels. Eventually it became a near ghost town.

This wrecked family home is but one surviving casualty of the brutal cartel drug wars around 2010. Gunfire in town streets killed scores of innocent civilians and orphaned many children. The carnage went down on both sides of the Border. Columbus had escaped serous gun play since 1916 when revolutionary (and bandito) Pancho Villa attacked the US in protest of our foreign policy towards Mexico. Jim Provencher and I encountered many boarded up houses and deserted storefronts. The streets were potholed and mostly empty. Residents had eventually fled the deadly fusillade of automatic weapons fire.
Some resilient residents remained and they struggled to help the many orphaned children. Craftspeople on both sides of the Line donated their wares to sell to assist the kids. In many ways, this is one of the most powerful shots that I ever took, especially given the context. It was a frigid, dark winter day in West Texas with a howling prairie wind cutting through town. The survivors we talked to exuded true grit. We left heading north taking some small solace from their steely resolve. Now, almost a decade later, Columbus is growing again while remaining wary of quixotic American border policy. The town is no longer an eyesore, but a a lingering sense of bone deep grief still haunts local memory.

The futility and pathos of the situation for the resident families is captured perfectly in this image of a discarded, damaged child’s toy. Look again!!

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Fractured Fungus Covered Window Glass. Junked Freedom Bus. North Carolina Salvage Yard.

The bus is part of some jarring American history but it also unexpectedly coughed up some funky modern art. I learned to shoot these naturally occurring abstracts from my colleague Jim Provencher. The patterns, coloration, and presentation are very engaging. But the location of this fractured glazing real piqued my

The Forensic Forage Thrives on Finding Funk.

Just like pornography, you know it when you see it. You might just define it simply as being “off the wall” or as being “quirky odd“. I have been combining funk with the mundane in photo frames for decades. Confronted with shooting something spectacular like the Grand Canyon or the

Some Suspect Rock ‘n Roll Was Banned in Our House.

Don’t Worry Mom, She’s Italian! Timi Yuro missed a golden chance for her career to be really spectacular. She turned down legendary composer Burt Bacharach’s offer to record WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS NOW IS LOVE, in late 1962. She had already charted Number 1 a year earlier

I Found City Lights, Ferlinghetti, and a Young Man Named Jack.

I never made it to City Lights Book Store until the 2011honeymoon of my second marriage. The ethereal lure of San Francisco’s iconic North Beach was then powerful enough to finally coax me there. As I foraged the upstairs nooks, I felt the creative energy of those Beat geniuses

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Fractured Fungus Covered Window Glass. Junked Freedom Bus. North Carolina Salvage Yard.

The Forensic Forage Thrives on Finding Funk.

Some Suspect Rock ‘n Roll Was Banned in Our House.

I Found City Lights, Ferlinghetti, and a Young Man Named Jack.