Density

There can't be too many works of art that are as human and political and epic and confronting and dignified as Richard Avedon's In The American West series. I stumbled across some old files I had of his work while looking for something much lighter, more colourful, more energetic as references for Galore... but, as soon as I opened them, I was arrested as I always am when I see them. Let any one of these faces be a film or a novel. Stolen in the 70s and early 80s, it's impossible not to wonder where these faces are and what they look like and what haunts those watery irises now...

This photograph, above, taken on May 7th, 1981 is of a trucker from Palo, Texas by the name Billy Mudd. Hard to imagine anything with greater density than that name, that face, that body.