Outbuilding
North Texas

29x37 inch C-print
2007

Nancy and I were on our way from Dallas to Monument Valley in southern Utah, the terminus of our trip. While Monument Valley was easily the most impressive place I've ever visited in the United States, one of my favorite photographs from that trip was of this humble little hut in an empty parking lot on an unknown stretch of highway in North Texas. I pointed a wide angle lens at the scene from across the parking lot and went on to other compositional possibilities nearby. The star or planet trail that crowns the shot and chronicles the duration of the exposure was something I never saw in real time and certainly never imagined would appear in that spot on the processed film. In fact, when I saw the negative with the light trail so centrally placed over the hut, I thought I couldn't have been that lucky and that it must have been some sort of lab error. When I looked at it closely, however, I realized that it was, indeed, a celestial phenomenon caught on film, with trails of both more distant and dimmer stars above and below it.