The World We Knew Is Gone - New Mexico.

On November 21, 2016 I proposed to my girlfriend, business partner, and best friend, Erin Summerlin. I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. We planned to elope at Sedona, where I first knew without a doubt I wanted to marry her. A date was set for 2018, but when I was set to scout a location for us, almost exactly a year before our wedding day, she admitted that she was having doubts. We spent the next few months trying to work it out, but one thing was clear, she had too many questions about herself and couldn’t answer them without going off to find out those answers on her own.

On March 1st, 2018 we broke up. All at once, I had lost my everything. Our lives were so deeply intertwined, to say I was devastated would be an understatement. Once I had such a clear picture of my future, of the life I had envisioned and worked so hard towards. Now all those plans were useless. I didn’t have a clear picture of what the next few days looked like, let alone the next few years. I needed to rethink everything about what I wanted, who I wanted to be, what kind of life I should aim for, and how I could rebuild a different, better future.

That’s when I bought a spacesuit.

I have always dreamed of going to space. I can’t think of any topic that interests me more than manned space exploration. When I think about what would make me happiest in life, it would be stepping foot on a strange new planet and exploring every inch of it. Discovering things no one had laid eyes on before, and gazing in awe of a wild and wondrous world of creation.

I had thought often about buying a spacesuit. Every so often I would look on eBay for an affordable suit similar to a Mercury suit (my favorite spacesuit design), but anything I could find was incredibly expensive or too cheaply made. I even once took a tour of Global Effects, the rental house in LA with spacesuit replicas so realistic that even NASA rents them for photoshoots, (so as to not ruin the real deal). Eventually I stumbled upon a near perfect spacesuit. It was clean, it was authentic, it had a good silhouette, and most importantly, it would fit me.

It’s a Chinese military surplus high-altitude pressure suit. So not technically a spacesuit, but more an edge of spacesuit. It took a few days of fiddling with to get it to fit me well and to remove cumbersome pieces that weren’t of any use since I couldn’t attach it to a spacecraft.

For my first stop on the trip, I had planned to arrive at Monahans Sandhills with plenty of time before sunset. But when I went to say goodbye to my ex, she realized she couldn’t fit all her belongings in her car with the pets like she had assumed. So I spent most of the day helping her rent a Uhaul that could tow her car and pack all of her stuff into the moving truck, and I could see them off. By the time I was pulling into Monahans Sandhills the sun had just set, and I still needed time to scout a location, get the camera set up and get in my spacesuit for the first time. Once I was all ready, the sun was long gone and all that was left in the sky were scattered clouds, a few stars, and a full moon. This was the first photo I ever took for the project.

This was the first time I had ever worn the full suit outside, and it was a surreal experience. I couldn’t see anything on the horizon but sand lit by moonlight. When my visor came down, I couldn’t hear anything but my own heartbeat and the sound of my breath. Since it was so dark, the shot had to be a taken as a slow shutter, meaning I would have to be perfectly still for 30 seconds. Quite quickly the humidity of my breath began to fog up my visor. While I remained motionless, I could see the world slipping away, until the stars became one blur and all that was left was my breath.

Perfect way to start the isolation and contemplation that was to come.

I spent the next morning capturing more photos on the sandhills, a place that was recommended to me by Penny Halcyon from when she photographed her Dune series there. Then I moved on to exploring Carlsbad Caverns, and walking around Roswell going to the ever-disappointing UFO museum, eating at the world’s only McDonald’s shaped like a UFO, and stumbling upon the delightful Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art. The next stop for photos was at White Sands National Monument.

White Sands is a very tricky place to photograph, the main reason being that the sand is so blindingly bright that typically you have to chose whether to expose to the sand or the person. Luckily I had prepared my equipment for this trip. I got a new polarizer for my lenses to deal with glare and reflections, I got a more portable tripod, I got a new camera remote, and a Canon 3 film camera so I could take 35mm slide film photos with the same lenses as my Canon 5D MIII for digital photos.

The other two difficult parts were that in order to look like I was exploring a completely desolate space for the first time, I had to go to the very back of the park and venture a couple miles out past anyone else, and I had to be extremely careful of my footsteps and the frame, because if I misstepped I would have to set up the shot all over again.

On the first real road trip my ex and I took, we spent 10 whirlwind days traveling out west, and one of the most memorable moments was seeing a sunset at White Sands for the first time. It’s such a strange place, your brain doesn’t know what to think. You look one direction and it looks like you’re at the beach and the ocean must surely be just over that dune. You look another direction and it looks likes you’re on a snowy mountain in the dead of winter. You look another direction and it looks like you’re on an alien planet.

Since White Sands shuts down at sunset, I had to pack it in and try to find my way back to my car in near darkness, after the wind had blown away all my tracks, and eventually stumbled upon my car just as a park ranger arrived to kick me out. On the way to my Airbnb for the night, I drove past the New Mexico Museum of Space History in Alamogordo. I spent the majority of the next day at the museum, reading every plaque, watching every video, closely inspecting every object. I had been aware of New Mexico’s importance to the space program, and it was interesting after listening to so much of the audiobook for The Right Stuff, to see so much of what they talked about, including White Sands Missile Range where they would test landings, and see the memorial of Ham, the world’s first Astrochimp.

The next day I drove out to the Very Large Array, which you may remember from the movie Contact. It’s one of the world’s largest radio telescopes. I had hoped to get some photos around it, but was unaware until arriving about the sensitivity of radio telescopes. Even just leaving your cell phone on can cause 10,000 more radio interference than they are trying to detect from distant galaxies. Not wanting to interfere with important science, I decided not to try photographing near them, and just took the walking tour instead. Besides, each of the 27 enormous telescopes were spread out in their largest formation at the time (a 25 mile diameter), so hoping to get more than one telescope framed properly was an impossibility with the equipment I had on me.

On the way out, I stumbled upon The Box Recreation Area, a box canyon just off the road where I decided to snap a few photos as the sun went down.

The next stop on my trip turned out to be my favorite, and also one of the most difficult to find. It’s called Bisti Badlands. It’s in northeast New Mexico, in Navajo Territory, and there is very little information about the place online. Even Google Maps doesn’t know how to get there, because it’ll try to send you down long, incredibly bumpy unmanaged dirt roads that will take hours to get through, and even when you’re close it doesn’t know where the entrance is. Luckily I had found good directions online and saved a screenshot of them, because as it turns out there is basically zero cell signal there.

After getting out of my car and walking up to the barbed wire fence, I saw a sign that basically said “Warning: This is real wilderness out here. Once you go past this fence, you’re on your own.” Realizing I hadn’t told anyone where I was going, I decided I should at least let my mom know where I was. My phone had half a bar at best, and couldn’t get a call through, so I climbed on top of the tallest hoodoo I could find, and gave her a call to say “Hey, I’m at Bisti Badlands. It’s kind of treacherous out here. Just wanted you to know where I was if I die.” But because of the high wind and poor signal, all she heard was, “I̵͡H̴e͢͏y̕͠ ́͠I̢͠'͜m͜͟ ̷̴a͠t̡͟ ͞B̴̡̛is̕t͡i̵ ͟B̧a̧͡͞d̷ļ̷a҉͢͡n͞d̷́s͟͏̧,̸̨ ̀i҉t̨̧͡'͟s̷͢ ̕k̶̢͢ì̴nd̡͞ ̧͘̕ǫ̷̕f treacherous o̧̢u͟t̴ ͟h̨̕͜e͞r̨è̕.҉͜ ̢Jưst͟͝ ̡͘w̴͜à͘nt͏҉̡e̸̵d̸̶ y̛͘͝ơ̡ų͜ ̀͢t̴͞o k͡ǹ҉o̷͘ẁ̨͜ ̵̡w̢h͏e̵r͠é ͡I̧̛ ͜͠w̢̨as if I die.” I’m sure that was a fun voicemail to receive.

One of the things I love most about Bisti Badlands is how completely alien it looks. There are few places on Earth that look so thoroughly bizarre. Not only do the rock formations look weirder that the average person has ever seen, but each time you round a corner you discover larger, weirder, more gnarled rock formations. Seemingly endless landscapes, each stranger than the last.

On top of that, you are hundreds of miles from almost anything. You could spend all day out there and not come across a single other person, and the only living things you’re likely to see are the odd lizards here and there. It becomes so easy to forget you’re still on Planet Earth, especially when you’re in a spacesuit.

I spent hours racing against the sun to get as many photos as I could before the light was gone. The most important time for the photos I was after was the moment just after the sun had set, when the sky started to turn orange and pink and purple, with stripes of color across the horizon. That’s when the sky and the landscape looked at its most alien.

By the time I had finished shooting for the day, the sun had completely set, and I had to walk back to my campsite in pitch black. I had learned since my experience at White Sands to buy a high powered flashlight to help me find my way back. On my way though I could see two eyes shining back at me, right in the direction I needed to go. Two eyes floating about as tall as me, and a big black silhouette I couldn’t quite make out. Even as I got closer, I couldn’t figure out what I was looking at, or if it was even human, but it was directly in my path and hardly moving, so I extended my tripod to possibly use as a weapon. It wasn’t until I was within 20 feet of it that I could finally tell that it was the biggest blackest cow I had ever seen, just chilling in the creek near my campsite.

I made myself some food, and slept in my tent under the stars, without a single person within dozens of miles and just the sound of wind and coyotes in the distance. I woke up just before the sun had risen, got into my spacesuit, and searched for a new background for photos. It’s amazing how some of the locations look like they belong in Star Trek.

When heading back home to Texas, I decided to swing by Santa Fe and check out the SITE museum, which just so happened to have an exhibit called Future Shock that was absolutely full amazing sci-fi related art. The work that impacted me the most was Lost In Time by Patrick Bernatchez. It was also a project about a guy in a spacesuit traveling through a wasteland. But theirs was a 46 minute short film set in a tundra, with the spaceman on horseback.

I was so blown away but the visuals and the vibe of the film, that it inspired me to want to create a short film to go along with The World We Knew Is Gone. I wanted to take the visuals I was creating, and the journey I was going through and turn it into a metaphorical story.

Summer was on its way, and the deserts would be too hot in my spacesuit, so I had a few months to stew in my thoughts before the next trip out in my spacesuit and to think of the kind of story I wanted to tell.

The World We Knew Is Gone - New Mexico.

The World We Knew Is Gone - Arizona.

Another Year Closer To Death.