On a winter morning in February 1975, a young Manhattan-raised photographer by the name of Stephen Shore visited West Texas and made a truly resonant image of a quiet street in the border town of Presidio.
In the photograph’s foreground, powerlines cast shadows onto an unpaved dirt road, where a man in a nondescript brown coat and cowboy hat and a tail-wagging black dog idle by a series of adobe homes. Mountains in Mexico beyond, La Sierrita de la Santa Cruz, and a careening El Camino make up the background.
Less than a decade later, the image was published in Shore’s seminal photo book “Uncommon Places,” a collection of photographs he took on multiple cross-country road trips. The images brought a never-before-seen beauty to seemingly mundane scenes of the American landscape.
The work is widely recognized as a contemporary classic that helped legitimize the acceptance of color photography as fine art. “Uncommon Places” has been shown over the years at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and in various other cities across the world including Paris and Berlin. (An image from the series of a saguaro cactus towering over a telephone booth in the Arizona desert has long remained my computer’s desktop background.)
Despite my familiarity with his work, I was unaware of Shore’s Presidio photograph until recently. My husband Cody and I were visiting Presidio over Memorial Day weekend and he — a photographer and fan of Shore’s work — was interested in finding the site of the original photograph, some 51 years later, and trying to recreate the image.
Presidio is a small town and there are only so many streets that have a similar mountain view to the south. But it was harder than we thought it would be to pinpoint where exactly the photograph was taken. Cody went on several evening walks, camera in hand, to no avail. A couple of locals we asked offered suggestions but weren’t too certain either. I kept thinking there had to be a smoking gun — a roof line maybe? — despite the five decades of change inflicted on the scene.
On one of his night walkabouts, Cody was politely confronted by a woman wondering what he was doing photographing the cactus in her front yard. “He was walking, so that was strange,” Carmen Elguezaba would later tell me. Big Bend locals generally favor vehicle transport, though everything’s within walking distance in most towns.
Coincidentally, during my own investigation into the photo, I reached out to Carmen, the local librarian, for her help finding the site. She recognized it immediately, having lived in Presidio all of her life. The street in question was Julian Tavarez Street, she informed me, a central route separating The Bean Cafe and Presidio Pour Over Coffee Co. The street is named after a local veteran who had resided there. The reason Cody and I had a hard time locating the site — even though it's smack dab in the middle of town — was probably because most of the adobe buildings in the original image were torn down, she told me over the phone.
If I wanted to learn more, Carmen told me I should reach out to Alcee Tavarez, the son of the street’s namesake. Alcee grew up there and still maintains a home around the corner.
Alcee — a former history teacher and onetime mayor of Presidio — readily engaged with me on the topic of the photo, though I’m sure it came off initially somewhat random. He knew the photograph, he told me, though he couldn't remember when he first saw it. In 1975, when the photo was taken, Alcee was a senior in high school.
The connecting adobe homes pictured in the image — painted shades of grey, tan and lime green — belonged to his family. “This guy took a picture of our house, our property,” Alcee said. “Little did we know it was going to be world-renowned.”
I texted him a copy of the photo so we could dissect it together over the phone. Upon seeing the image, Alcee remembered details that opened a window into Presidio’s rich history.
His family referred to the area as “the Tavarez compound,” Alcee said, because his family of six, his uncle and his grandparents all shared the same water well, gas and electricity. An electrical box mounted on the front of the house to the far left connected to multiple dwellings via knob and tube wiring, which can be seen draped across the buildings’ facades.
Growing up, Alcee and his siblings were put to work to help maintain the house, he said. He recalled times he climbed onto the roof to fix leaks and helped make cement blocks, which formed additions to the house. The first building to meet its demise was primarily a storage space that burned down, he said.
There was a dog run that became a carport — where the man in the photograph is standing. Alcee couldn’t place him, but guessed the man was there to visit his grandfather Manuel, who also owned the town barbershop. The parked truck with the wooden bed was likely used to transport produce like onions and melons, or maybe livestock, he and Carmen guessed.
The white Chevrolet El Camino turning onto the street belonged to Mr. Sosa, Alcee said, who used to own a nearby store where they kept track of accounts the old school way, by hand, only requiring customers to settle up at the end of the month. He said all the neighborhood kids used to play underneath the street light in the photograph.
The spirited black dog was Alcee’s pet Brule (his mom had French heritage but they pronounced it “Brooley,”) — a known rascal who “had like nine lives” and “loved porcupines,” necessitating trips across the river to the vet.
Alcee joked that he could have sued Shore over the photo “on behalf of my dog Brule.” I suggested the lawsuit could have gone towards Brule’s vet bills.
After talking to Alcee I had a greater appreciation for everything Shore chose to include in the image. It seemed to me he must have sensed the Tavarez compound was a special place, emblematic of the town.
My inklings were confirmed while skimming Shore’s memoir “Modern Instances,” where he writes that during that time his work had “been moving toward greater structural complexity.” He was thinking about how to effectively translate the world we see into meaningful photographs. He writes that city intersections provided a “visual laboratory” for which to study spatial continuity.
“The question remains: Why this particular intersection, on this day, in this light, at this moment? I had learned to recognize the taste of the experience of making a deep psychological/emotional/physical connection with the content of the picture,” Shore wrote.
It would have been a slow and deliberate process when he took the Presidio image. He was using a large format film camera on a tripod “where every decision is so starkly etched,” he wrote. The cost of developing a single one of the images was also burdensome — roughly $75 in today’s money — so he only took one photo of any given scene.
Cody and I returned to Presidio recently to visit what is left of the Tavarez compound with Carmen and Alcee. It was the hottest part of the day, requiring us to scurry into the scant shade “like lizards,” Carmen joked.
If you look down Julian Tavarez Street today, it’s somewhat recognizable as the location of Shore’s photo – the road is still unpaved, and the left side of the street has a similar, if not the same, fence. But in large part, the scene Shore captured has changed dramatically due to the absence of the old adobes, which suffered leaks, fell into disrepair, and were torn down. The last remaining one, which appears lime green in Shore’s photo, has faded to the color of desert sand.
Alcee said he wishes his family could have saved the buildings. He’d like to see more historic preservation in Presidio.
Carmen and I peeked in to see dusty furniture and books still inside the old home. Alcee warned Carmen not to get too close to the building. The entire property is for sale, but the family plans to tear down the last remaining adobe, the house Alcee grew up in, due to safety concerns.
“They'll be in that picture forever,” he said. “But all those homes will be gone.”
