Text by Bruce Berman
Whatever this crown was announcing is long gone. A bar? A restaurant? A store? Probably a bar… but who knows?
The photograph of the Crown of Canutillo, Texas is what remains (and perhaps a memory here and there).
Who constructed it? Why a crown in this funky little town that’s on the border up against New Mexico? Was there dancing?
Who knows?
This is the nature of documentary photography. As anyone who deals with photography knows, photographs are almost facts but not quite. In the end they are just photographs with visual crumbs leading to a sense of fact,” but which, in the end, are just crumbs, taken out of context, limited to where the photographer put the border, manipulated the space with composition, light, and, the ultimate manipulation: which millisecond of time he/she chose to capture.
In the end we only know the photograph not what it contains. We only have the poetry.
Enjoy it.