I started out like most photographers, reading mainstream photo magazines. When I was in high school, I saw a feature on an Australian photographer named Grant Mudford. Before I had any training in art at all, I was just blown away by his sort of "soot and chalk" look. His color work was intense as well, and the hard light of Australia reminded me of the desert light that surrounded me. Though I would eventually be seduced away to the bleaker light of the "new topographics" photographers like Lewis Baltz and Henry Wessel, for a time I thought drama was an essential quality to a landscape. Part of me still does, but it's a subtler sort of drama. However, this didn't stop me from doing the occasional moody sketch.
This one is from Taft, an old oil town about an hour from Bakersfield. I just loved the ruins, and the cracks.
