Some Important Background Information

County collecting is the process of driving through each county of a particular state. I decided to focus on the state of Texas first since it is my favorite state. I’ve been to every state so it’s only natural to start chipping away at the counties. It’s like once you’ve mastered the alphabet you can start reading and writing. Once you’ve been to every state you can start going to every county. There are different rules to county collecting: some collectors insist you stop at the county courthouse at the county seat of each county, others want you to spend some time in a particular county doing something, some want you to physically touch the ground of the county you are in, others insist you can only count the ones you see during the daytime. My rules were simple if you drove through the county it counted. Most of the time I would stop to take a picture of a movie theater anyway (more on that later) so my feet were actually touching the county. And I hated doing it at night and I have more or less re-done all the counties I visited at night (again it’s hard to take pictures in the dark). Anyway, I started with Texas approximately 15 years ago although I’ve been traveling to Texas my entire life. However, I didn’t count the counties I may have picked up when I was a kid. When I was a child it was not uncommon to spend a summer month visiting my Grandmother in South San Antonio. I have very fond memories of those times. We would drive or ride the bus but I never flew until I was an adult. In fact my first flight was from San Antonio to Minneapolis (my home at the time).

Texas has 254 counties spread out over 260,000 plus square miles. It is quite a spread of land. If you have never been to Texas it might be very hard for you to imagine (especially if you live on the East Coast) driving endlessly and never leaving the state. There is a lot of real estate and quite a variety of environments to explore. And up to this time I have seen almost all of it. This isn’t to say I’ve driven every mile of every road, that’s probably impossible or at least very unlikely but I’ve seen more of Texas then most Texans have and that is saying a lot.

So many years ago I started taking photographs of old Movie Theaters. You know the kind from yesteryear with the big marquee out front and all of the colored lights and interesting building design features. Most of them are closed down these days. It’s like the history of a by-gone-era. Movie theaters don’t look the way they used to - anymore then the movies they show inside look like the movies from days long gone. Actually, I call my photographs - snapshots so I wouldn’t give anyone the idea that I was a real photographer because I’m not. I have used just about any camera; little disposable cameras, Polaroid’s, a traditional SLR 35mm camera, and sometimes even my Lomo toy camera. One time I used a camera for golfers that that takes multiple pictures on one frame milliseconds apart designed to help them improve their club swinging technique. So clearly it wasn’t about talking great artistic pictures, although you might be surprised if you saw the results. The collection of photos has grown pretty steadily over the years. Much like driving EVERY mile of the highways of Texas, I know I haven’t taken a snapshot of EVERY old movie house in Texas. The margin of error is just too great. Along the way I’ve picked up a lot of stories about these theaters and in fact a lot of stories about the people of Texas as well. There are millions of old stories as you can probably imagine. It’s always a new adventure.

I’m down to collecting my last six counties and they are all in the Panhandle Plains near Amarillo. So that’s where this adventure will start. I will be nice to clean up Texas once and for all. But I have a feeling I will probably just start over again anyway. There are fifty states and thousands of counties but nothing, and I mean nothing is like being here.

I AM TEXAS.

p.s. those missing counties mentioned above can be seen on the map below if you look very carefully at the top of the TX map (they are NOT highlighted).