July 2021
**Museum of the Big Bend Talk**
I gave a talk at the Museum of the Big Bend for the Texas Photographic Society. This is a link to it on YouTube.
https://youtu.be/UG8c-2NlzNI
You may have to fast forward through some ads till you get to the opening title. It says James H Evans Museum of the Big Bend Talk. This is the first time in years that I have posted anything on YouTube, and I am not sure how it all works. Email me with any issues, and I will try to resolve them.
**Melba**
When I first moved here Melba was the woman that collected the money for the water utility in Marathon. I had not met her yet, but someone told me she once owned and operated a bar in town, and that she talked like a sailor. I mentioned the latter when I made this image if her.
**The Slow Burn of the Creative Process**
When I was younger it seemed like ideas for images and/or a series of images would surface like bubbles in a champagne glass. Some were good and led to a nice body of work, while others played out in an image or two, or dissipated as fast as the bubble. My second book, Crazy from the Heat, demonstrates this well. It’s not as cohesive as my first book, Big Bend Pictures, and it is more of what ever interested me that day photographically. As I have aged, it seems like that creative process has slowed down some, but there are other factors. I do not go to the park or camp as much as I used to. Camping and sleeping under the stars, for me, had a profound effect. Ideas and concepts would come to me. Funny thoughts too, I’ve laughed out loud under the stars many times.
I spend most of my days in Marathon working on and organizing the images I’ve already shot for a new retrospective book and enjoying the house that Marci designed for us. I still make portraits and photograph in town, but I don’t feel the need to go to the park. Tourism too, has changed the Park, Terlingua, and Boquillas very much. It’s over run. I’ve hiked nearly every trail in the park by myself and been the only person on that trail. I’ve hiked at night, spent days in the back country without seeing another human being. I’ve had several cameras set up all over the park, and was the only person moving around in the night. I’ve watched clouds form, storm and flash flood and then dissipate. I’ve walked over to the rain. I’ve seen amazing animals and critters, and snakes, and birds, and watched their behavior. Not like the matter of factness of a scientist, but with the emotion of an artist. I recently watched a documentary of Paul McCartney. He was going through the Beatles music, and explaining how a song and melody came about. But he didn’t explain it technically. In fact he admitted, he does not know how to read music, which I found astonishing. He would say something like, we put a chord over top of that chord to make it sound like this. Or how he woke one morning and the song Yesterday, was all there in his head, and he asked John Lennon and George Martin where the song was from, he felt like he must have heard it somewhere, and that’s why it was in his head, and they both confirmed they never heard it before. I just love that. Ideas, sometimes, they just arrive.
I had the park all to myself for about 25 years. It was, and is, a sweet life and love affair. Don’t get me wrong, I still love the park and enjoy every minute we have together. I just don’t see it as much as I used to
Thank you all for helping me create this wonderful body of work, give my existence meaning, and live the life I wanted.
Happy Full Moon. Get Outside.