I am fascinated by descansos — the roadside memorials to the dead that are invisible to most of us. Photographing them has become an ongoing project with the results going on an interactive map and into a coffee table book.
Since this has become a substantial project I have started documenting some of what I have learned. Did you just want to see the photos?
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New Mexico
Two weeks after the trip I am finally caught up on the photos I took in Colorado and New Mexico. From a photographic perspective the trip exceeded every expectation. The Reddit users who replied to my question about the presence of descansos near Santa Fe…
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Seeking Death
Enough people have suggested that the photos would make an interesting coffee table book that I decided to look into it. I got my start at my day job decades ago by writing and self-publishing a few books so I figured “how hard could it…
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Feedback
It’s sort of impossible to get feedback on photos, it seems. Or, if it’s possible, I’m not smart enough to figure out how to get it. But I’m trying, and to that end I have created a collection at YouPic which will let me share…
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Crowd Sourcing
It occurred to me that other people are seeing descansos and taking note of them even if they aren’t taking photos. I decided to test this theory using Reddit, the “front page” of the Internet, when I asked the Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico…
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One Hundred Descansos
On my trip to Puerto Vallarta I shot my hundredth descansos. It was Victor, if my math is correct, although the order I publish the photos isn’t quite the same as the order I photograph them in. Not that it matters, I suppose. I don’t…
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Deadly Highway 97
I started this project in January of this year without being sure what it would become, what I would learn, and what I would gain as a photographer. I’m still unsure on the first and third points, but I have definitely learned one thing: Driving…
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Descansos en Mexico
The rainy season has come to the Pacific Northwest and so the wife and I increasingly go looking for warmth and sunshine. Usually that means going to Sunriver, Oregon on deadly Highway 97 but last week we were able to spend time in Mexico on…
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20/6
Amity and I went to friend Richard’s house today to see his new setup for woodworking and the such. I grabbed the camera, thinking to myself, “Highway 20 seems like it will have some descansos along it.” Six, in five miles. Six memorials on Highway…
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Sad
This one made me really sad. Alisa was killed by a drunk driver, she was barely an adult … not even old enough to drink herself. And she was a mom. This stuffed bear, and the adjacent bottle of Fireball, got to me. As a…
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City
I don’t know why I was surprised to come across Jeff’s descanso in Bend but I was. I guess I am just used to the memorials being on the sides of busy or high-speed roads. We were doing some shopping and as we pulled out…
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Missed Shot
Wife and I drove over to Central Oregon yesterday and the weather was unusually bad, even for this time of year. “Snain” for the most part — that heavy snow that is more or less a giant drop of water — which given the length…
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Anonymous
One of the things that I find sort of fascinating is that some of the descansos I am finding are completely anonymous and others have the deceased’s name all over them and go so far as to tell the story of their demise. I’m sure like anything…
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The Road to Nowhere
One thing I have discovered in my excitement for this project is that you can’t just go out looking for descansos in the same way you can drive to the store. There is a zen to it, although, at least this far there is no real rhyme…
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An Integrated Experience
I’m a technologist first and foremost. The money for this hobby comes from my work running an analytics consultancy for nearly twenty years. Before that I was building web pages and writing code for companies and my alma mater, Oregon State University. I grew up around computers…
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The Tools of the Trade
One of the drivers behind this project is that I have invested pretty heavily into some good camera gear. Specifically I jumped from basically shooting on an iPhone … to a 100 MP Hasselblad X2D. It was a pretty big jump. My friend Nick, who is…
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I Go Out Seeking Death
When I decided I was going to start this project I realized that, really, what I was going to do was get in a car and go look for places where people died in cars. Sort of bleak, but at the same time the idea…
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