Gabe.
Camera: Q2
On Houston St.
It's been three and a half years since I walked through the downtown streets of San Antonio, Texas. Back in 2019 my father passed away there. I had been driving down from Austin a couple times a week for over a year to oversee his care, and to enjoy his company, and I guess it was my sadness at his passing that deterred me from coming back for anything other than funerals and holiday gatherings with family. As far as photography and San Antonio were concerned I'd hung up my cameras and closed the book.
My brother turned 70 last month. He still lives in San Antonio. He asked me to come down and eat at our favorite Mexican food restaurant to celebrate his milestone birthday and to catch up. I couldn't pass it up. I hadn't seen my brother in over a year even though we live only an hour and a half from each other. I also grew up eating fun, delicious Tex-Mex meals at La Fonda restaurant and that was a strong lure. I decided to try some "shutter therapy" (credit to Robin Wong for that) and turn what might have been a quick jaunt down and back home into a daylong revisiting of San Antonio's vibrant downtown; along with a camera and a couple extra batteries.
When my father passed away my wife and I spent about half a year coming down to San Antonio to clean out the house he and my mom lived in for forty years. My brother was anxious to be through with the process. We donated nearly everything in the house to various charities. In cleaning out one closet I came across my father's favorite coat. An old, classic London Fog trench coat. Kept in perfect condition. It was too big for me and my brother was adamant that he didn't need or want it. I guess I had too many memories and emotional attachments to let it go so I brought the coat back up to Austin and hung it in my closet. Never quite sure what to do with it.
A couple of weeks ago, while we were arranging a time and day to meet for dinner in SA I mentioned the coat to my brother. He was surprised that I kept it. He had come to regret not accepting it when I first asked. He'd worked through whatever it was that moved him to pass it by the first time. Now he was happy to have it. Not that anyone living in the mild climate of San Antonio has any actual need for a trench coat.... Maybe he'll get a couple days use out of it each year.
I brought it down for him yesterday and he was quite pleased. Delivering the coat reinforced my "need" to come to town. As did a small packet of photographs I'd also uncovered, made by my parents, from my brother's very early childhood. Black and white on deckle edged photo paper. Quite charming.
I prefer to enjoy family in small doses. I'm not one to sit around and reminisce. We agreed to meet at 6 p.m. at the restaurant but I came into town around 11 in the morning. I wanted to spend the majority of my time in San Antonio in the downtown area and I wanted the solitude of walking by myself, kept company by a small camera in my hands.
After a lot of thought I settled on bringing the Leica Q2. It's a perfect camera for those days and situations on which you have no preconceived idea of what you want to photograph. No established target for your photographic energy. Just a curiosity overlayed with sentimental memories of walks through the same streets years and decades earlier.
I always try to park on Avenue B, just northeast of the Alamo. Down the street from the old Emily Morgan Hotel, now posing as a Hilton Garden Inn property, just across the street from San Antonio's most visited landmark...
Since I generally drink a cup of coffee on my road trip to San Antonio my first stop is a quick duck into the public restrooms at the Alamo to pee. I have no other real interest, photographic or otherwise, in the Alamo so I quickly head over to Commerce St. and head west towards El Mercado; the big market at the west end of the street, just before the overpass for highway I-10.
All along Commerce St. are classic and (by American standards) ancient buildings that have been repurposed, generation by generation, into restaurants, bars, gift shops and other attractions for the flow of tourists who come to "the Alamo city." The buildings are wonderful to look at because most of them have good "bones" and the designs and architecture are much different than Austin. Mostly because Austin was for the longest time a much smaller town and had much less money to spend on magnificent buildings.
I mostly use the camera with the lens set at its usual 28mm focal length. But with 47 megapixels at my disposal I have no hesitation to using the crop mode to bring up frame lines for 35mm and 50mm. I'm still learning to trust the 7.5 megapixel, 75mm crop but I bet I'll get there... On a bright, sunny day I set the WB to the "sunny" icon (daylight) and use the camera with the Jpeg format. No need for raw files if there's no color to correct or underexposures to fret about...
I spent some time walking around the market, looking at all the restaurants and maybe five or six hundred gift shops crammed into several vast interior spaces. El Mercado has long since shed its original reason to exist. It as once a hub for farmers, ranchers and other food producers to meet and do commerce with the restaurant food buyers and even the general, fresh food buying public. But that use vanished decades ago, replaced mostly with vendors selling bright colored and highly decorated cowboy hats, hand crafts from Mexico, candies and souvenirs. The weekend scene is lively because bands play in the open spaces of the sprawling market walkways and food vendors serve up Mexican favorites all day long. In all but the worst weather weekends are a long, lively party of dancing, drinking and casual shopping. Need an authentic pancho? They'll have it in ever color scheme you can imagine. And you can shop with a margarita in hand.
I'm rusty when it comes to photographing San Antonio natives. Tourists are easy. Like shooting fish in a barrel. But I've lived in Austin for too long. Surrounded by a different culture and a different demographic. It's hard to not feel that I'm an outsider now in what was once my home town. But I'm guessing that if my visits become more frequent I'll break down some of the psychological barriers that make me feel I'm taking advantage of people by photographing them. Isn't that interesting?
I was walking back east from the market and marveling at all the small shops and bars along the way that are closing down. Ostensibly making way for another wave of big, anonymous office and hotel building construction. I stopped by a restaurant called The Royal Blue Grocery for a long overdue lunch that consisted of a slice of pizza and a small bottle of Pellegrino.
In the next block I ran into Gabe. The person in the photos above. He was waiting in front of an office building. He is a photographer and had organized a Sunday afternoon meet-up for fellow photographers, complete with a demonstration of studio lighting by a photographer that Gabe described as one of the top commercial photographers in San Antonio. I guess he was waiting to greet stragglers. He stopped me to ask about my camera. I assume he thought I was coming to the lecture and when I passed by he must have figured I was lost and so made contact.
We chatted for a bit and he described all the things their photo society is working on. Kind of a casual support group for people who are, like ourselves, addicted to the craft. It was nice to hear. We exchanged contact info and, at the last moment I asked him if it would be okay to make a portrait of him right there. He readily agreed. It was a nice moment for me. I'd been looking at the work of Paul Reid and while I don't want to copy Paul I do now find making portraits with a wide angle lens, with the aperture wide open, to be intriguing. In some ways revelatory for me. I've spent so long working at the longer end of the focal length spectrum.
At a different area in San Antonio, a new shopping and restaurant area centered around a restoration of an historic and famous Texas brewery, I also met a second young photographer. It was just the kind of comfortable day when people were out to rediscover the basic joy of walking around with a camera and no set schedule. No responsibilities and no agenda. Just walking for pleasure. Photographing out of curiosity and joy. Ending the day with a plate of glorious enchiladas and tacos and then driving back to the land of yoga, IPOs, Porsches and emerald green lawns. San Antonio is more interesting...
What did you do over the weekend? I hope there was a camera involved. ...
