New Mexico Weird

A collection of experimental and expired film from the Land of Enchantment

This January, I found myself, as I do every year, longing to get away from the snow and cold of the Rockies and hit the open road to the desert. After staring at snow and dead trees for months, I was ready to see something new, a landscape I'd never seen. My good friend Tommy Christie had told me many times about the stark beauty of White Sands National Park, so we made a plan to go visit for a few days. The drive from Denver to Alamogordo is a long one, nearly 9 hours without stops. Thankfully ,we would not be going alone. Two other friends, Austin Smith and Shawn Bruns, joined us on the adventure. We caravanned across the whole state of New Mexico, stopping by abandoned outposts and ghost towns, savoring a journey that most Americans will probably never make. Southern New Mexico is extremely desolate, the settlements are few and far between, and there's no destination to speak of other than this barely visited national park.

Between the rolling dunes of White Sands and the alien charms of Roswell, I had found myself in a photographer's paradise.

This is a desolate and lonely stretch of country, but there is a strange and singular beauty to be found here by any artist who has a taste for the ascetic. The energy here is different. It lends itself to mirages and strange visions, so in preparation for this trip I brought along a handful of experimental and expired films. My hope was that they might capture the feeling of the desert more than my razor sharp digital images. I'm not sure if that's actually true, I'm incredibly happy with the photographs I took on my Sony camera (one of then is a banner image on this website) but I can't deny the obsolete charm of these idiosyncratic images shared below. While they're a little too weird for my Instagram gallery, I think they deserve a special home in a Dispatch.

These might not be an accurate visual representation of driving across the southwest, rather I hope they make you feel like you're seeing an alien world.