PALM SPRINGS BY CHRIS WALLACE

We have not posted something here in a while but we have a few special stories coming up. This one is from our friend Chris Wallace who shot a really intimate series of portraits and landscapes loosely based around a visit with his father. Here is what Chris has to say about the series.

We’ve all had a lot of time to think about our dream vacations of late. Too much time, in a purgatory of lockdown, or else stuck between travel restrictions that seem to be in constant rewrites by Kafka — endless amounts of time in which to dream, to bookmark our digital Baedekers with aspirational trips, to pin all of our ambitions for amusement, relief, release on a map of the world.

        For a lot of us, though, the first trip out of the pandemic, the obligatory trip, is to see family. About a decade ago, my dad moved to Palm Springs, making my visiting him there something potentially more than obligatory, potentially even fun, like a getaway. “Potentially” — because you’ve all spent extended times with your family, and we can talk about it together later in therapy. But the idea of a visit there always presents itself as an opportunity, to sip margaritas poolside under the dramatic arch of the nearby mountains, to do Palm Springsy things. This time I even got it into my mind that I would take pictures of my dad and his world as a kind of homage to Larry Salter’s great Pictures from Home, a book Salter made about his parents who’d retired to the valley here in the 1980s. And maybe it was this project that put me in the mind of paradise in general, and paradises themselves as oases in a desert of dreams. 

CW