Texas: in 8 seconds.
I’m hit by the smell.
I’m driving through flat land, open on every side, with nothing between the road and the horizon. No barns. No herd. No black dots moving in the distance. Just fields, sky, wind, the straight line ahead.
So where are they?
Half an hour later, the answer is in front of me. Plainly. The sight is as strong as the smell. A wall. Not very tall, but endless.
Cattle. Everywhere.
From horizon to horizon.
If the sight is stunning, the smell is overwhelming. I look for an angle. There isn’t one large enough to hold the whole scene. No wide shot wide enough. No frame that can take it all in. Never mind, I don’t need to stay too long in this olfactory inferno.
I had been warned. In Arkansas, Shawn had described Amarillo from his time as a truck driver. The feedlot infrastructure is so spread out that he needed maps —plural— to find the right loading area. It’s one of those things you can know in advance. It can be explained to you. You can even believe it. But seeing it, smelling it, is yet another world altogether.
We’re talking about over two million head here. I repeat: Two. Million. Head.
In other words: a shitload.
I move on, away. Fast. And once again, I’m on a stretch of Route 66.
Before I know it, I find myself on its exact mid-point. I stop to shoot the marker and the bikers refueling themselves in the mandatory “Mid-point café”, next to the “Mid-point station” that faces the “Mid-point marker”…
They’re following the old line west, looking for some romance that has survived just enough to still attract bikers from all over the world. These ones are French. After a couple of mandatory jokes about each other’s accent, I take a few portraits and ask them to align the Harleys on the exact midpoint, across the whole road. The idea seems to please everyone around (but the few cars blocked behind me). Everybody leaves their beer and comes out to take the shot. Even a national TV outlet, happening to be at the right time, at the right place. My French friends are on their way to fame.
The new highway has replaced the old road almost entirely, but a few stretches still run beside it for the sake of tourism and history. So I take one.
Then I take it too far.
The pavement gives way. The road turns to gravel. And that is how I enter New Mexico without giving it a second thought. Sideways. By mistake. Which, in fairness, is just as good a way to enter a place.
Texas is big enough to forgive a detour. For a while, New Mexico runs parallel to it, almost like a preview of the next chapter. Then I find my way back into Texas, where Route 66 appears again through markers, signs and reminders of its hundredth year. 1926–2026. A road turned into memory, anniversary and national construction all at once. I stop for a quick photograph of a painter covering a wall with Route 66 history. Both marking it in our own way.
By dusk, I reach Palo Duro Canyon.
“The second-largest canyon in the United States”, they tell me.
This detail seems important to everyone. I understand why. Scale is part of the local language here. Bigger. Larger. Wider. First. Best. Most. I’m in Texas.
I can’t help wondering why everything has to be ranked before it can be admired.
I have not been to the Grand Canyon yet, but I can already tell Palo Duro is not that. It doesn’t need to be. I enjoy it for what it is to me: beautiful, diverse and full of childhood debris. Tumbleweed. Roadrunners. Coyotes. Cliffs. Ravines. Red walls. The occasional rattlesnake. It’s all there.
A Tex Avery landscape.
No anvil though.
For a while, I simply enjoy the scene. Then the thinking comes back. The question of scale. The second-largest canyon. The biggest this. The most beautiful that. The best road. The top ten. The must-see. The place you have to go to before you die.
At some point, normal stopped being enough.
I remember this from photography. Years ago, when I was starting out as a reporter, I entered contests. Some local. Some more serious. It helped put my name somewhere on a map. Then I stopped. I didn’t see the point anymore. What is the value of comparing one way of seeing with another? I might be better than you. You might be better than me. But who says? Based on what?
Today, the same reflex is everywhere. Comments, likes, ratings, stars, feeds. Someone’s opinion becomes a value system.
That is not the road I’m on.
This project doesn’t exist to prove that a place is spectacular.
Just to see what is there.
In my earlier work, the photographs were often spectacular by nature: action, drama, proximity, wildlife, rarity. Here, more and more, they are just normal. A street. A diner. A front yard. A pumpjack. A face. A road. A town that barely appears on a map.
This isn’t a downgrade. I mean it as a point. I want simplicity. I want life as it is. However it is. Wherever it is.
Sometimes I look for a picture I’ve had in mind for years. Inevitably, I don’t find it. Or not the way I wanted. For half a second, I’m frustrated. Then I realize I was given something better. Not the picture I planned. The one that happened.
That is the “unposed” in America. Exposed, unposed.
In Oklahoma, I had been looking for oil infrastructure and pumpjacks that could speak of history, displacement, local wealth and development. You do see pumpjacks there. In fields. In prairie. In front yards. Even downtown. But Texas is another scale altogether.
There it is again. Scale.
It’s no longer the occasional pumpjack in the prairie. It’s oilfields dotted with swarms of mantises, or “nodding donkeys” as they’re locally known. Here, unlike most roads I took so far, you can spend hours without seeing a living soul.
And then, just as suddenly, the large landscape gives way to a town. A bar. A post office. A church. Two hundred-something people and a name on a road sign. I’m always fascinated by remote towns in the middle of nowhere. Because it’s not nowhere to the people who live there.
It is somewhere.
It’s home.
I wish I had found more people in those places to ask why they stayed, what they built, what keeps them there. I didn’t. Not this time. Some doors stay closed. Some towns remain seen from the outside.
The road keeps running long and mostly empty across West Texas. Dry fields. Low brush. Semiarid distances. A few tanker trucks. The occasional oil rig. A flame-spitting stack in the distance. Light everywhere. Too much light. Harsh, vertical, punishing light.
For five days, I drive more than I photograph. I look. I stop. I get out. I get back in. Nothing happens. The roads are empty. The light is too hard. The landscape feels too thin. I start losing my grip on the trip.
That is always a dangerous moment.
Not that there’s nothing to photograph. But I start thinking so. Once that verdict settles in, the road closes. The eye tightens. Everything becomes proof of the frustration.
I know this trap. I still fall into it.
I carry on under the scorching sun, looking for shade and fresh air in a roadside restaurant. I fill the car. I fill myself. The films, not so much. I can’t invent a subject just because I need one. I sit there with the unneeded shame of someone who has crossed half a state and comes back with almost nothing.
Texas is too large to force.
So I stop trying to match it.
Because of the sheer size of the place, I begin to feel the need to photograph another scale. A flower might do. A sheep. A diner window. A hand on a bar. Images of the road rather than images meant to describe the road.
Maybe that is where Texas starts for me. In the smaller things that finally let me breathe.
I reach Big Bend National Park with one unreasonable hope left: something. Anything. A subject. A frame. A reason to believe the road has not closed entirely.
The words “National Park” do their work on me. I expect the label to change the landscape. I expect the light to soften, the lines to arrange themselves, the place to become suddenly available. A postcard, if not a revelation.
How naive.
At first, Big Bend looks exactly like the country I have been driving through for days. Dry, pale, overexposed. Low brush. Stone. Distance. The same hard light pressing down on everything. My mind, always willing to play tricks when it needs hope, had promised me a border. Not the one on the map. A border between frustration and relief.
I remind myself that I don’t know the place yet. The land may look familiar. It’s not familiar to me. I have no idea what it has in store, or whether it has anything in store at all. It’s early morning. The light is still acceptable for my rolls. I decide to stay open. Hit the visitor center. Talk to someone. Let the place prove my mood wrong.
It doesn’t. No revelation there. No helpful sentence. Rare enough, but there it is. Still, I refuse to let it bring me down completely. There is one thing here that won’t move. So to speak. One thing I want to see for the name alone.
The Rio Grande.
It takes me a couple of hours to get there. I don’t rush, because part of me still wants to believe the rest of the park might open somewhere along the way. I keep stopping. Rock formations. Mesquite. A monstrous storm cloud pouring rain in the distance and throwing a perfect beam of light on the road behind me. Thirty miles behind me. Why, why, why?
Eventually, I reach the river.
I park the car and continue on foot, looking for the right angle from above. I climb around in the heat, sweating so much the cacti nearby might soon die of over-hydration. The view is there. Mexico on one side. The United States on the other. A line drawn by water, geography, law and imagination.
I take the shot. Then I go down toward the bank. I know the slope is slippery, so I pack the cameras away before sliding. Which is wise. Because I slide.
Into the Rio Grande.
One hundred and seven degrees. Sand everywhere. Not my finest moment, yet it does feel good. I check the cameras’ vitals, shoot some more, already thinking about the cost of having the cameras cleaned and the interesting conversation I’m going to have with the ca rental company. At least it makes me smile. You take what you can get. Then you ask for more.
Because now I’m standing inside a name. The Rio Grande. Or Río Bravo, depending on which side of the story you come from. A river I knew before I saw it, as one knows certain places before seeing them: through films, songs, headlines, novels, maps, crossings, threats, dreams, bodies, work, fear and escape. A river that is not only a river. It is border, wound, passage, argument, promise. One bank looking at the other. Two countries close enough to shout across, far enough for history to get between them.
And yet, there in front of me, it is also just water moving through stone. That’s what surprises me most. Not the legend. The modesty. After everything attached to its name, the Rio Grande does not need to look grand to matter. It only needs to be there, cutting through the desert, doing the work of a line and a lifeline at once.
That helps. Not enough to save the day entirely. But enough to shift something.
After a long day in the Chihuahuan Desert, I drive back toward another kind of light show.
Marfa.
There’s the art, of course. The galleries, the reputation, the desert minimalism, the whole idea of a remote town made famous by people coming from elsewhere to make it mean something. I arrive after business hours, when most of that has gone quiet. The end-of-day light is beautiful. Colorful facades keep it alive for a while. The streets are nearly empty. A few people in bars and restaurants. Almost no one walking around. Even the wind seems to have slowed down. It’s just the town and me.
An old church. An old pickup parked in front of it. Blue this time. I photograph it with one eye locked on the church door, almost hoping the story might repeat itself and someone might come out, curious enough to talk. But the door too is locked. So I keep walking.
I come across a pink fire station. I photograph it for a friend addicted to the color. Sorry, Mel. Real estate offices, too many not to notice. They seem to confirm what I have heard about the place: an artistic ideal turned destination, then market, then pressure. Beauty arrives. Money follows. People who made the place what it was are often the first to feel pushed out of it. I will hear more about that later, from someone who has survived here long enough not to speak in slogans.
For now, I walk through the empty town until I find the only crowd around. Three people. An old man with a dog on one side, a young couple on the other. The sidewalk gives me no graceful way around them, so I break the circle to pass.
The cameras do what cameras always do. “Well, here’s a photographer ready for your wedding.”
I had not meant to interrupt, but after days of talking mostly to myself, I don’t mind an exchange. It takes me about two and a half minutes to read the room. The couple is desperate to leave. The old man cannot stop talking. I can, at least, give him someone else to talk to. I answer the wedding joke, then redirect him toward himself and his motorbike that I want to photograph.
It looks like the bike of an adventurer. Gear tied everywhere. Dried mud. Tools. Even a lasso. The kind of machine that immediately calls for questions. As I start asking them, the couple slides away with the natural elegance of people being rescued. A wink. A whispered “thanks”. I knew it.
Full disclosure: I am more interested in the man’s weathered face than in his bike. Deep wrinkles. Skin so sun-burnt that it looks like leather. A manicured beard but wild hair under a hat as creased as the rest of him. And a way of looking at you that can mean either: tell me more, I want to know everything, or I am about to beat you senseless.
I take the risk of option one.
Jackpot. I have found someone who can talk more than I can. That is saying something. At least he is interesting. More than interesting, actually. For reasons I cannot disclose here —and no, that’s not a literary trick— I cannot recount the conversation. I promised.
Let’s just say this. If you have a little imagination, and if you have watched a few films set in this part of the world, you probably can guess what the story is about when it’s told by someone who owns a ranch on both sides of the Rio Grande, knows everyone on either side and asks me not to write any more than that. You would still be light-years away from the full picture. But I leave it there.
Dusk is taking shape, and I still want to see the lights.
Off I go to discover the famous Marfa lights. I don’t really know what to expect. By now, you know I don’t look things up before traveling. But I know the lights. The mystery. The theories. The explanations and counter-explanations. Some I want to believe. Some so absurd I could have come up with them myself.
And then I see them. By which I mean someone shows me where to look.
A white dot. A red dot. On the horizon. At the foot of the mountains. In the middle of them. Dots in line. Dots moving. Dots flashing. Dots dancing. Dots apart, then joining, then splitting again. I could go on forever describing the show. And yet, like any other Joe, I can’t connect the dots (Yes, I had to do it.)
Around me, theories begin to rise in the dark. Headlights. Atmospheric tricks. Spirits. Aliens. Government things. Energy fields. Someone has read something. Someone has heard something. Someone knows someone who saw something impossible. The show becomes light and noise. Or rather light and chatter, because frankly, very little of what I hear qualifies as sound.
Still, it’s funny. And strangely beautiful. Maybe not because of the lights themselves. Maybe because mystery, when people agree to stand inside it for a while, has its own kind of spectacle.
All in all, a good day. In a desert of inspiration.
One thing I did not want to miss in Texas was a dance hall, a landmark in local culture. I ask around —at LBJ’s ranch, of all places— and I’m pointed toward a local place that people describe with the kind of caution reserved for things they still care about. After five rough days, it feels like the promise of something beautiful ahead of me.
That is where I meet Kristin.
She owns the place with her husband, Michael. After a few beers and a nice chat over the bar, I get to the actual dance hall. It stands just across the yard, a separate, hangar-like building with heavy metal doors. I slide them open, the light settles and my eyes adjust. I take a couple of pictures of the empty room. I know they will not be the greatest images. Probably not even worth printing. But that is not their purpose. Their purpose is to unlock something I had probably locked inside myself over the last fruitless days.
Back to my beer, Kristin and I talk about the place, music, Texas, my project and the states where our paths have overlapped. We talk about seeing things differently. Meanwhile, the usual suspects come in. They don’t need to order. Kristin has already opened their favorite bottle.
Leather boots. Washed blue jeans. Large shirts tucked in. Cowboy hats. That unmistakable accent. Very local indeed.
Live music is about to start, by a singer whose stage name could hardly be anything but Texan: Cattlelac.
The Star-Spangled Banner opens the set. Hats come down. Then come the country standards, the familiar songs and the occasional Beatles cover. People follow along without making a show of it, tapping fingers on the bar while children play in the six-hundred-year-old tree outside, under branches spread enough to give the whole place the shade it needs.
On the side of the dance floor, Miss Peggy, a seventy-something original cowgirl, gets hit on by a cowboy who could just as well have been an old flame from another life. I like her immediately. I ask for a picture. She says no. Fair enough.
I leave instead with a portrait of Kristin, the soul and heart of the place. She tells me dance halls are a dying breed. If that is true, hers feels like it will be the last standing.
The next day, or maybe the day after, I sit in a diner owned by a Cambodian man. We talk about the region he comes from, which I happen to know fairly well. He serves me a mean sausage croissant and the strongest coffee I have tasted in America so far.
I decide to stay for a while and catch up on notes.
I don’t want to forget.
The pictures will bring memories back, but writing now keeps the temperature of the moment alive. The words are rough. The order is wrong. It doesn’t matter. I need to catch the instant before it cools.
Through the angled window, I watch the usual American crossroads at the edge of a small town. Gas station. Diner. Church. Road signs. Tanker trucks going by. Familiar scene. Nothing spectacular.
Then a yellow truck loaded with hay bales passes by, absurdly high, outscaling everything around it. Almost hitting the hanging traffic lights.
For a second, I think about running to the car and chasing it. But you don’t scramble with a camera bag half open, notebooks, maps and pens all over, and a tab still unpaid. So I let it go.
“I’m closing in ten minutes”, the man tells me.
Time to get back on the road.
By chance, I take the same road as the truck. Of course, I start wondering how fast I would have to go to catch it. Turns out, not very fast. Half a mile later, I find it parked on the shoulder, hazards on.
I waste no time.
When the driver comes back, he sees me photographing the load.
“Quite the thing, huh? A hundred thousand pounds up there.”
He agrees to stand in front of it for a portrait, to give the whole thing scale. Then he adds, “Just be careful where you post that. You don’t want me to follow you.”
Whatever that means.
That, for me, is often how the road works. I let something go, then it waits for me half a mile later. Not always. Not often enough. But enough to keep me from forcing things. I take what is there, when it is there.
That is the “exposed” in America. Exposed, unposed.
Eventually, I leave the open country behind and enter San Antonio.
I normally avoid big cities, but I can’t pretend to visit Texas without a proper visit to the Alamo. A friend later asks me what I thought of it. I’m not sure what I think. I can say how I felt.
As a European, surrounded by very old history, I often find the past difficult to reach because it is everywhere, and still too far away. Too abstract.
At the Alamo, the distance is shorter. Two hundred years ago is almost recent where I come from. It does not feel old in the European sense. It feels close. Not dramatic in the way events feel while they are still happening in front of you, as I knew from my years as a reporter, but close enough to sense the human cost behind one of the places that helped define Texas.
Then, Austin.
After weeks of back roads, entering a major city feels like another country. Highways split, merge and attack from every direction. Sky turns the color of concrete. Traffic flows like an unrehearsed choreography. I normally don’t come to America for that. But what I’m about to see in Austin is worth every jam, every sign read at highway speed and every last-second lane change.
People had described Austin to me as the New York of Texas. Americans said it. Europeans said it. I never tried too hard to understand what they meant and I’m still not sure I do. To me, Austin feels less like New York than like Texas turned up loud. Not the ranches, barbecues and rodeos. The other Texas. The grandeur. The proud display. The need to belong visibly to one state, one culture, one story. Here, everything is about Texas. And they let you know.
“We keep it under the American flag out of respect,” I’m told, “but our flag could fly right next to it.”
In one of the proudest countries I have seen anywhere in the world, that is saying something. I’m not here to decide whether the feeling is justified. I’m here to notice that it exists. Texas feels different. Separate, almost. And yet deeply part of the larger country.
After all the concrete, the ramps, the city spreading in every direction, the reason I have come here feels almost absurdly small. About six by eight inches.
The very first photograph in history.
Niépce’s heliograph. The image is hard to see. Its surface reflects more than it reveals. And with the conservation setup around it, you have to work your way to find the picture inside the object. I stay in front of it for half an hour, stunned that I am looking at the thing that started the thing that shaped my life.
Trying to put words on my own thoughts, I’m looking for a comparison that would define the importance of what I’m looking at. The best I can come up with is: it is not like a painter looking at a Picasso. It is more like a painter looking at the first trace of pigment ever laid on a wall.
Before style. Before history. Before schools, markets, movements and opinions.
The beginning.
Which makes me smile, after all my thoughts about scale, rankings, biggest, best and first. Maybe first still matters when it is not used as a trophy. Maybe it matters when it marks the moment something becomes possible.
Photography became possible there. Niépce famously acknowledged that it needed further improvements but was nevertheless "the first uncertain step in a completely new direction."
And because of that small, almost unreadable image, my own life eventually became possible in a way too.
In Austin, I also happen to see one of the few surviving complete Gutenberg Bibles. It does not move me in the same way, but it still carries the charge of something that changed humanity.
I once heard the comparison being made between Gutenberg’s printing press and artificial intelligence. I understand the premise. Both changed the circulation of knowledge. Both altered who could produce, access or distribute it. But, to me, the comparison only goes so far.
The printing press spread the word —literally, almost. Knowledge traveled faster, farther, in quantities humanity had never known before. But it still moved at a human pace. Pages had to be printed, carried, read, argued with, absorbed.
A.I.? It arrives everywhere at once. It produces, imitates, answers, invents, distorts and multiplies before the mind has time to catch up. The press made knowledge travel. A.I. produces knowledge and its counterfeit with no clear seam between them. At a speed the human mind cannot keep up with. We are not prepared.
And yet, here it is.
I’m on my way to Houston when I change the plan again. Instead of cutting inland, I drive along the Gulf of Mexico. Long lines of ice-cream-colored stilt houses stand above the shore, lifted from the ground like they know something we keep forgetting.
And they do.
Galveston Island carries the memory of the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history. In 1900, a hurricane killed thousands there. Six thousand, eight thousand, depending on the account. Numbers large enough that they stop meaning anything precise. After that, the island was raised, a seawall was built and the residents learned to live with water as a permanent threat.
The houses on their wooden legs suddenly look less charming. They look like memory made architectural.
If you think you are focused when you enter Austin, try Houston at rush hour. The highway splits, drops, rises, merges and throws you into lanes you couldn’t see from the one you were in. It’s less driving than urban gymkhana. I make it through, somehow, to the place I had come to see.
NASA.
Back in Alabama, I had already seen the machines that flew on posters in my childhood bedroom. In Houston, I complete another part of that dream. I enter the actual Mission Control room. The very room where Armstrong’s famous step was monitored from Earth.
The scale changes again. Not Texas scale this time. Human scale against the impossible.
With an unforeseen yet natural reverence, I sit in the red seats of the viewing room above Mission Control, where families and reporters came at any hour, day or night, to watch what was happening below —and up there. The Mission Control room has been restored to how it looked back then. The furniture, the binders, the flags, the screens, even the ashtrays and cigarette butts.
Speaking of close history. Here, you can truly feel what the world was holding its breath for.
And to help you feel it better, the whole sequence plays again, exactly how it happened back then: lift-off, Moon landing, return to Earth. The actual thing. The computers light up. The gigantic screens display Saturn V’s trajectory, and later the images we all know. Armstrong coming out of the lunar module. The first step. And of course, the audio transmissions recorded between the room and outer space. Every famous line we have heard in films. Hearing them here, while watching the events unfold, is —well, I can’t find any better word— spectacular. If I hadn’t been trying to take a decent picture in that surprisingly dimly lit room, I would have closed my eyes and imagined the people in there, shoulders tight, waiting for the next voice from space.
For the third time in a matter of days, I time-travel through human history. And as I write this, my stomach tightens again! The experience is —pardon the pun— otherworldly.
Okay, Texas.
You are big.
I’m in Hill Country.
Local community. Ranch life. Cowboys and cowgirls. That can only mean one thing.
Rodeo.
I know the imagery. I have a broad idea of the sequence. But I don’t know the ropes. Quite frankly, I have no idea about the intensity of what is about to take place before me.
The spectacle is everywhere. In the arena, but also outside of it. Barbecue smoke rises from every corner. Beer flows. Improvised parking lots in the surrounding fields are filled with pick-up trucks in such numbers that you could believe a Ford dealership opened overnight.
And everyone, absolutely everyone, is dressed for the part. From two to ninety-two, the whole place seems to have agreed on the same visual language.
Men wear creased leather boots, faded jeans, pearl-snap shirts and white cowboy hats. The belt buckles are not accessories. They are a declaration.
Women wear short shorts —denim, obviously. Shirts either pale or deep-colored. Boots. Western hats set low, ponytails falling down the back. A little silver at the belt, the wrist, the hatband. Skin, leather, dust.
I’m not one for uniforms, but I have to say, they do have style.
The rodeo itself is a live wire. Everything is speed, muscle, dust and release. Gates open and the body has no time to understand what the eye has seen. Calves shoot forward. Horses cut hard. Riders hold on to bucking animals with a violence that looks both controlled and impossible. Children compete with the seriousness of adults. The crowd knows when to laugh, when to cheer, when to hold its breath.
I can barely photograph it. The action is too fast. The light too low. The distance is wrong. I miss more than I catch. But what I lose in visuals, I gain in memories. And for once, the frustration does not stay. It gets blown away as soon as the gate opens.
Eight seconds.
The smallest measure I observe in Texas. Yet, long enough to prove something.
Maybe that is why it stays with me. After weeks of driving through a state too large to frame, after trying to understand scale, light, pride, distance and dust, Texas suddenly gives me the perfect unit of time.
Eight seconds. Hold on. Don’t pretend you control it.
Stay with it long enough for the thing to count.
Just like photography.
Texas and I finally align.
Note to self: Light. A force to be reckoned with.
To be continued…
