Not long ago Jason Barnette (@jasonbarnette) posted about having the privilege to shoot his home town. Tomorrow I will head back to my home town of High Island, Texas, to do the same (not an assignment, just for me). This will be the first time since discovering my passion for photography and I look forward to revisiting the place that helped shape who I am with a more discerning eye (and a kick ass lens). As a teen, all I wanted was to escape small town life. As an adult I can see the value now where then all I could muster was disdain. My home town is barely a dot on the map as well, we used to joke that the population was 500 *if* you count the cows and the chickens. And most directions for outsiders include some rendition of ‘when you see the cow, turn there’. It got its name because the town sits on a salt dome that raises it to 38 feet above sea level (the surrounding area is roughly 4 feet above sea level) and being less than a mile from the beach, when hurricanes come in it frequently floods well beyond the town at which point it literally does become and island. We had one school that served Kindergarten through 12th grade, one small store that also sold gas, and one gas station that also sold milk and bread, but we had 5 churches. For those of you in the U.S., the show “Friday Night Lights” *was* my high school experience. Football was not a sport, it was a religion. My English teacher graduated with my dad in 1961 and they made the newspaper for having the largest graduating class in the history of the school with 16 kids. Twenty-four years later, my graduating class was also a record breaker with a whopping 27 students. A lot of this is written in past tense. The wrath of hurricane Ike seriously changed the landscape of my home town and that general area. I’ve been home off and on over the years but it was usually for a specific event and then right back to the big city but not at all since Ike, and never before with the intent of capturing it. I’m really looking forward to it and hope I can do it justice.
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