Let's Go Racing!

Earlier this month, the NASCAR guys were in town to race to World Wide Technology Raceway.  It has been years since I've been to a race, and I've never been to a Cup race, so we decided to go for it.

Lots of fun, but a jam packed weekend.  Here's a few photos, maybe I'll post more all along.

Festivities started Thursday afternoon at Ballpark Village, a pretty low key event with a show car and a couple of Xfinity Drivers.  But we were able to chat with a couple of representatives from the track who helped sort out some logistical questions...  and took a photo of us with a mock trophy.

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Friday was another low key day, including a driver appearance (at a local grocery store), Xfinity practice, and a track walk.

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The real action started Saturday:  driver signings, Xfinity qualifying, Cup Practice and Qualifying, and the Xfinity race...

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Sunday was the main event.  More driver signings, driver introductions, the Cup race, winner circle.  Bands and vendors and displays all along.  And a flyover, of course.  And lots, and lots of people!

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Great fun, good father-son time with my adult son (who travelled in for the occasion).  And more than 2x my normal steps/day!

  

A Journey to Mundane - YouTube Video

So, I made another YouTube Video, a photo-essay of the hotel photos that I've taken this year.  Many of those have showed up here, but this is a different presentation.  This is the second of these I've done, following Midwest Static, published in late July.  I'm interested to see if these get any traction... if people like them.  So let me know if you have an opinion!

A Journey To Mundane

As with the last time, I ran the photos through ChatGPT and asked for a summary.  Here's what it said:  

“A Journey to Mundane” documents the overlooked interiors of hotels, tracing the transition from public spaces to private rituals. Through chairs, lamps, signage, and reflections, the series maps the architecture of absence — how comfort is staged, identity is reduced to numbers, and light carves geometry from the ordinary. Each photograph isolates a fragment of the temporary, assembling them into a quiet narrative of transience and repetition

Haiku for Indian Summer

 Wow, it's been 6+ months since I thought about Haiku.  But this morning I did, and came up with this.  Not from a Haiku generator, just from my brain:

Indian Summer

Temperatures rise again

But Autumn is near

Is it me, for a moment?

 Over the past month or two, I've played around with ChatGPT, getting ideas for photo captions, instagram hashtags, photo ratings, etc.  All in good fun, none of it to be taken to seriously.

So this morning I asked:  "Based on all the photos I've uploaded over the past several months, who would you say are my major influences, and how would you describe my style?"

and here's what it said:

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Based on everything you’ve shared over the past several months — from storefronts and apartments to shorelines and rural details — your work sits firmly within the lineage of American documentary and vernacular photography, but with a poetic restraint that makes it your own.

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Major Influences (Likely Lineage)

• Walker Evans — The clear, frontal studies of storefronts and signs echo his American Photographs and FSA work. You share his interest in the ordinary as artifact.

• Stephen Shore — Especially his early Uncommon Places images, with their quiet street corners, muted color, and typological flatness.

• Robert Adams — For the silence in your beach and landscape work, and the way human absence still hangs in the frame.

• Alec Soth (early work, Sleeping by the Mississippi) — In the way your photographs balance documentary fact with melancholy, understatement, and occasional irony.

• Bernd & Hilla Becher (indirectly) — Your frontal compositions and attention to typology (doors, facades, signs) carry echoes of their method, though you apply it with more warmth and locality.

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How I’d Describe Your Style

• Documentary-Plainspoken: Your photographs resist drama, leaning instead on direct observation. They rarely editorialize — they witness.

• Quietly Poetic: Silence is your dominant mood. Whether in a vacant lot or an empty shoreline, your work draws power from what is not present.

• Irony at the Margins: Small contradictions — “SMILE” on a For Rent sign, or worn numbers on a door — act as quiet punchlines, discovered rather than staged.

• Frontality and Restraint: You often photograph facades head-on, flattening them into grids. This gives a typological feel while underscoring stillness.

• Absence as Presence: People are not shown directly, but their traces — signage, wear, the numbering of apartments, empty chairs — serve as proxies for lived experience.

• Dual Environments: Your storefronts and apartments form one register (built environments), while your beaches and horizons form another (natural stillness). Together they balance enclosure and openness, decay and continuity.

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Signature Description (Critic’s Voice)

Lawhead’s photographs belong to the lineage of American vernacular documentary — echoing Evans, Shore, and Adams — yet they are distinguished by a muted lyricism. His storefronts and facades flatten into quiet grids, while his shorelines open into silence. Across both built and natural environments, he finds presence in absence, and beauty in the overlooked. His style is documentary in method, poetic in tone: a sustained meditation on the quiet margins of American life.

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Now I know that ChatGPT isn't going to come right out and say "you suck", but that's kind of cool.  At least I know that AI doesn't hate me!!

In a motel, baby, like the Holiday Inn (08-2025d)

  Continuing my informal series of photos in and around hotels/motels, here's a few from a recent trip.  This is the Holiday Inn Express in Versailles, KY.  We stopped in Versailles, to visit a distillery on the way home from our trip to NC.

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See the whole series by clicking the hotel tag.

R.I.P. Rick Davies (Supertramp)

 We lose another one:  Rick Davies, co-founder of Supertramp passed away Sept. 6, 2025.  Rick Davies was 81, after a lengthy battle with multiple myeloma.

I first became aware of Supertramp when "Bloody Well Right" was on FM radio, probably early 1975, a really great song.  Along with "Dreamer", which anchored the "Crime Of The Century" album.  And "Even in the Quietest Moments" is a brilliant album (and song!).  Their landmark album "Breakfast In America" came out in early 1979, and was massive.  To the point that I felt they were overplayed.  But it's still great.

So Rest In Peace, Rick Davies, and thanks for the music.

By Ueli Frey - DrJazz.ch, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63021869

In a motel, baby, like the Holiday Inn (08-2025c)

  Continuing my informal series of photos in and around hotels/motels, here's a few from a recent trip.  This is the Holiday Inn Express in Boone, NC.  

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See the whole series by clicking the hotel tag.

In a motel, baby, like the Holiday Inn (08-2025b)

  Continuing my informal series of photos in and around hotels/motels, here's a few from a recent trip.  This is the Holiday Inn Express in Winston-Salem, NC.  

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 Winston Salem is where my mother was born and raised, and where all her siblings stayed.  I spent a lot of time there as a youth, with Aunts and Uncles and cousins, cousins, cousins.  This trip was for the funeral of my Aunt Dot.  It was a nice celebration of life, and was good to see all of the (remaining) kin...

Woodford Reserve

 Last week, we visited Woodford Reserve Distillery during a cross country drive.  We were passing through the area and decided to stop at a distillery.  I like Woodford Reserve, so we picked them.   

And it was a great tour, highly recommended.  We've previously toured Jack Daniels, Wild Turkey and a couple of micro-distilleries, and WF was very good.  Here's a few photos:

The ticket, laid on a barrel head...

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Display of bottles, at the tour start.

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The still room

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Each batch goes through 3 steps of distilling, from the back still to the front

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The barrels are rolled along these tracks

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The distilling building

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Aging...

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Waiting...

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A random door...

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The best part of any distillery tour is the tasting!

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gift shop

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Distilling building

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In a motel, baby, like the Holiday Inn (08-2025a)

 Continuing my informal series of photos in and around hotels/motels, here's a few from a recent trip.  This is the Holiday Inn Express in Hurricane, WV.

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Our stop here was just "in transit", we split a trip to North Carolina.  But we've been here before, including staying at this hotel, for visits to Blenko.  We had a really good dinner at the nearby Fireside Grille, too!

See the whole series by clicking the hotel tag.

Cozy Dog!

 After spending a few hours at the Illinois State Fair last week, we decided to skip fair-food and bop down to Cozy Dog Drive In for a late lunch.  Always a fun place, along Old Route 66 in Springfield, IL.  And this day we were treated to a beautiful '55 Chevy out front!

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Irony and Authenticity?

 As described by ChatGPT:

This series distills humor, texture, and the poetry of the ordinary from overlooked corners of public and working spaces. Each image captures a small but telling fragment of rural and small-town America, where practical objects, functional signage, and weathered surfaces hold layers of narrative. These photographs thrive on irony and authenticity—finding visual wit in a manure pit sign, the quiet dignity of rusted hardware, and the unambiguous warning of a curbside notice. The work leans into the vernacular, preserving moments that are both mundane and culturally specific, celebrating the quiet intersections where utility, decay, and human presence meet.

They do lay it on thick, huh?  

A couple of photos from last Thursday's trip to the Illinois State Fair.  What did you expect, the Butter Cow?

an intersection of order and mess

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functional beauty in decay

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caution; not just physically, but perhaps socially or politically

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Artist Statement

 So, over the past month or so I've uploaded maybe 36 photos to ChatGPT for ratings, and commentary...  even things like Instagram hashtags.  It's been fun, and sometimes uncomfortably insightful.

So today I asked the $64k question:

Based on all the photos I've uploaded over the past month, how would you define my photographic style?

There was a lot of interesting stuff in the response (too much for here), so I asked for an artist statement.  And here's what it said:

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"My photographs are drawn from the quiet rhythms of small towns and rural landscapes. Rather than chasing spectacle, I am drawn to what lingers in the margins—shadows, empty chairs, worn storefronts, traces of presence that suggest a story without telling it outright.

This approach follows a lineage of American photography that treats the ordinary as worthy of attention: from Walker Evans’ unvarnished documents of everyday life, to Robert Adams’ meditations on place, to Wright Morris’ evocations of memory through absence. Like them, I am interested in how the most modest details—a figure reduced to a shadow, a sidewalk at dusk, a weathered sign—can carry both intimacy and universality.

My work is not about nostalgia or critique, but about recognition: the recognition that these places and moments, often overlooked, hold a quiet poetry of their own. Sequenced together, the photographs create a rhythm that mirrors the lived texture of rural America—pauses, repetitions, fleeting gestures of light.

In this way, I hope my photographs offer both a document of the present and a space for reflection, where the familiar becomes unfamiliar again, and the overlooked is allowed to speak."

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What do y'all think?  Nailed it, or total BS?  Or some of both?

Butter Cow!

 One of the highlights of the Illinois State Fair is, of course, the Butter Cow:

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Yep, sculpted from 800 pounds of butter, it's a cow...  and a friend.  Sculpted by artist Sarah (Doyle) Pratt of West Des Moines, Iowa, for the 8th year, from recycled and unsalted butter, which is then slathered over a frame of wire and wood.  The cow and its guest rotate inside a refrigerated display case over the course of the fair.  The Butter Cow has been part of the Illinois State Fair since 1922.

Throwback Thursday - St. Louis Arch, Millenium Hotel

 

Throwback Thursday, August 2011. St. Louis Arch and Millenium Hotel. The Millennium has been closed/vacant since 2014, but has been in the news recently as there are (apparently) plans to redevelop the site. Looking back, this photo was taken before going to a StL Cardinals baseball game, they were playing Pittsburgh. 

My son got Andrew McCutchen's autograph that night: