Category Archives: Photography

Pictures I have taken.

I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything. ~John Steinbeck

Nose Art

Posted on by Bill Chance

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

It is too late.
—-Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, opening lines.

Machine gun and pinup girl

Machine gun and pinup girl

The doomed flyboys of WWII painted pinup girls on the noses of their B-17s cementing the fusion of sex and bombs, of beautiful women and annihilation from the sky, of danger and love, of longing and luck, of desire and death.

Image from Wikipedia.

Image from Wikipedia.

This is the (arguably) most famous of all, the “Memphis Belle.”

I give you a reproduction, a homage if you will – painted on a restored old car, a “Rat Rod” – complete with fake machine guns mounted over the exhaust headers.

Rat Rod - Car Show, Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas

Rat Rod – Car Show, Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas

Sex and power and death and speed, beauty and doom, lust and destruction – a potent cocktail that tastes like licorice and smells like gasoline.

Texas Blues

Posted on by Bill Chance

I’ll tell you ’bout Texas Radio and the Big Beat
Soft drivin’, slow and mad, like some new language

Now, listen to this, and I’ll tell you ’bout the Texas
I’ll tell you ’bout the Texas Radio
I’ll tell you ’bout the hopeless night
Wandering the Western dream
Tell you ’bout the maiden with wrought iron soul
—-The WASP, Jim Morrison

Revolution Car Show, Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas (click to enlarge)

Revolution Car Show, Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
(click to enlarge)

Preview

Posted on by Bill Chance

Since the advent of digital photography, the whole rhythm of taking pictures has changed. You shoot, then tilt the camera down to look at what you have.

Sometimes you don’t even think. Shoot, tilt, look, delete, shoot, tilt, look, delete. Repeat until you get what you want.

Klyde Warren Park, Dallas, Texas

Klyde Warren Park, Dallas, Texas

I miss the days when you had to wait. These were the days when every statement about a photograph was prefaced with, “If it comes out…”.

There was the excitement of picking up the thick paper envelope of prints at the photography store. Standing on the sidewalk outside, tearing open the packet, and going through the pictures. Usually, there would be one that you knew was the shot you really wanted and you would quickly shuffle until you came to that one. Then you would pause and stare. You would, “If it came out…”.

Or, even more exciting, was the sweet smell of bitter chemicals, the dim yellow/green safelight, and the ghostly image appearing out of nothing on the waving paper drifting in the developing bath. There was a sensual excitement of the whole ritual – from loading film on a reel in the pitch dark – working completely by feel. Then the mixing of chemicals followed by waving your hands in the rays of the enlarger, dodging and burning and trying to get everything just right. Finally the developing, the fixing, the washing and then drying. Only after all that could you turn on the light and see what you had… art, or crap. Or both. Or neither.

Bronze Steers

Posted on by Bill Chance

There is that very well known giant sculpture of a bigger-than-life cattle drive in downtown Dallas. You know the one – the one with all the tourists taking photographs.

But those aren’t the only bronze steers in the Metroplex. Out in Frisco, in a sort-of-hard-to-find spot called Central Park, they have a few put in.

Bronze cattle drive, Central Park, Frisco, Texas

Bronze cattle drive, Central Park, Frisco, Texas

The stone is strong, but the bronze is stronger. The cattle burst through the rocks piled into a wall – they explode with power – an irresistible force meets a strong, yet moveable object.

But at the moment they escape the stockade – exactly when they erupt into freedom… they are frozen. Suddenly motionless in space, trapped in static time – helpless. For what better prison than the polished and tranquil passage of silent, lifeless time. Time passed is more powerful than any corral of stone, the only inescapable confinement.

Like the bronze steers we are all given an eternal sentence in the slammer of time, trapped in a single moment, the eternal present.

Grids in the Pool

Posted on by Bill Chance
Reflecting Pool, Arts District, Dallas, Texas (Click To Enlarge)

Reflecting Pool, Arts District, Dallas, Texas
(Click To Enlarge)

Reflecting Pool, Arts District, Dallas, Texas (Click To Enlarge)

Reflecting Pool, Arts District, Dallas, Texas
(Click To Enlarge)

The shallow pool is so still that it becomes a perfect mirror, especially on a calm day. Until someone runs by, children’s little feet, stirring up the water in a series of overlapping sets of concentric ripples, mixing and refracting each other until the image blurs and breaks up. It doesn’t take long to settle down and everything is sharp again. Back to normal. Or… what is normal? surely not the clear reflection. Maybe the confusion of little feet is the normal – only through great effort by the designers, constructors, and maintainors of the vast black stone slab with its thin slip of water… is the illusion of clarity created.

Reflecting Pool, Dallas, Texas (Click To Enlarge)

Reflecting Pool, Dallas, Texas
(Click To Enlarge)

Awning stretching out from the Opera House, Arts District, Dallas, Texas (Click To Enlarge)

Awning stretching out from the Opera House, Arts District, Dallas, Texas
(Click To Enlarge)

This thing is a lot bigger… and a lot higher up in the air than it looks in the photo. During the heat of the day the gigantic aluminum louvers provide relief from the deadly Texas sun. Toward sunset, once the firey orb has descended below the level of the shade… well, it’s just plain cool to look at.

Hood Ornament

Posted on by Bill Chance

I’m no expert, but I think this design was originally from a Pierce Arrow.

Not to be confused with a Peirce Arrow – which is true only when everything is false.

The first Pierce-Arrow archers were slight in frame, partly clothed, and helmeted. Later versions depict a helmet-less archer with no clothes and a little more muscle. Both versions are graceful and elegant, which is funny when you consider that a fellow sweeping the floor of the Pierce-Arrow factory was asked to be the model. After attending archery classes to add realism to the pose, Albert Gonas used his broom for the arrow.
—-from historicvehicle.org

Hood Ornament, Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas (click to enlarge)

Hood Ornament, Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
(click to enlarge)

The job of a hood ornament is a tough one. You are out there, unprotected, in the wind.
You wonder what it would feel like to be the Spirit of Ecstasy – even on a Rolls, exposed, fighting the sun and the rain.

And so unappreciated.

Back in the cool days, nobody would think of buying or driving a car without a piece of iconic sculpture rising above the radiator cap. Now they are all but gone. The malfeasance of the modern world in its various manifestations is exposed in the reasons for the disappearance of the hood ornament.
Too expensive.
Too easy to steal.
Too original.
Too personal.
Too dangerous.

The same mysterious forces that saved me from being impaled on the steering wheel also saved the young engineer’s wife. Apart from a bruised upper jawbone and several loosened teeth, she was unharmed. During my first hours in Ashford Hospital all I could see in my mind was the image of us locked together face to face in these two cars, the body of her dying husband lying between us on the bonnet of my car. We looked at each other through the fractured windshields, neither able to move. Her husband’s hand, no more than a few inches from me, lay palm upwards beside the right windshield wiper. His hand had struck some rigid object as he was hurled from his seat, and the pattern of a sign formed itself as I sat there, pumped up by his dying circulation into a huge blood-blister – the triton signature of my radiator emblem.
—-J.G. Ballard, Crash

Red and Blue

Posted on by Bill Chance

Super Soul: And there goes the Challenger, being chased by the blue, blue meanies on wheels. The vicious traffic squad cars are after our lone driver, the last American hero, the electric centaur, the, the demi-god, the super driver of the golden west! Two nasty Nazi cars are close behind the beautiful lone driver. The police numbers are gettin’ closer, closer, closer to our soul hero, in his soul mobile, yeah baby! They about to strike. They gonna get him. Smash him. Rape… the last beautiful free soul on this planet.
—-Vanishing Point

Beautiful Cars, Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas (click to enlarge)

Beautiful Cars, Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
(click to enlarge)

Super Soul: This radio station was named Kowalski, in honour of the last American hero to whom speed means freedom of the soul. The question is not when’s he gonna stop, but who is gonna stop him.
—-Vanishing Point