 |
View from the Majestic Theatre, Elm Street |
In the late 1970s, I had a studio on the 17th floor of the old Banker’s Life building in downtown Dallas, for which I paid $100 a month. I bought clothes from Sanger-Harris, ate lunch at Sol’s Turf Bar, browsed the Doubleday bookstore on Commerce Street, and paid my gas bills in the lobby of the Lone Star Gas building on Harwood Street. But mostly I walked the streets, sometimes with a camera.
So when I chose a subject to begin my MFA track work at Texas A&M-Commerce in September 2003, I was drawn back to downtown Dallas. It was an opportunity to revisit a part of the city that had changed but had retained evidence of its past.
These images are both a record of, and comment on, the contemporary vernacular landscape. I have been looking at signs and text (particularly hand-painted), marginal businesses, and parking-lot kiosks and pay boxes. I am attracted to the obsolete, cast-aside, neglected, and repurposed elements of the 20th-century landscape that are disappearing. Among these elements, I often find unintended beauty.
It has been a bit like doing archaeology in the present, thinking about what may need to be documented for the future, what artifacts to save and to catalog. Sometimes, society no longer sees a need for a building or neighborhood, and it is replaced, its visual history lost—and, along with it, a piece of the society’s history is lost, too. —P.C.
 |
Doug’s Gym, Commerce Street
|
 |
Get One Free, Elm Street
|
 |
United Artists building, Harwood and Wood streets
|
 |
Gus’ Barbeque, Harwood Street
|
 |
Dallas Milliners Supply, Elm Street
|
 |
Kiosk No. 2, Wood Street
|
 |
Central Expressway and Commerce Street
|
 |
Griffin and San Jacinto streets |
