Charles Henry: new monochrome: it was modern when I was there

Whenever anyone looks inside a view camera, everything appears upside down. I'm Charles, a picture-maker. I investigate built and natural environments along roads in Texas and the Southwest, maintain a darkroom, and print monochromes to create and experience something every day.

Perhaps photography freed the painter from rendering, and non-objective art released the photographer from the camera. Whenever I describe a creative approach, the process remains basic: I do whatever I want. Also, art has six visual elements: line, shape, form, color, space, texture, value, and perhaps whenever we consider an element alone, we find a path to reinvention. Maybe it's possible to test value: increments between dark and light, contrasts of low and high, keys of low and high. Sometimes I think painting shows how, and maybe whenever value compresses, photographs soften.

Everything I know about art and photography could be incorrect, and next week, I could change my mind and try something new. We don't know yet. However, each of my series differ in thought, and Permian Basin pleases me the most because it captures the mood and atmosphere, memory and mental picture, of a place as lived. I could photograph anything. However, my emotions exist within and perhaps always will.

Permian Basin is my first impression of life: traveling with my father to deliver rotary bits to drilling rigs in the oilfield, riding over caliche roads in a red pick-up truck, watching a level landscape covered with mesquites pass outside the window, hearing country music on the radio. I drew pump jacks then. Often we would eat lunch at Andrews, and I remember an oilfield worker, the corner jukebox, the smell of steak fingers and a lady managing a cafe. It was life, a tough place somewhere in the oil patch.