Vanishing Point

Rob Atkins divides his time between commercial and personal photography. You'll notice that if you take away the divide, it's all photography—and Rob has no trouble with that. "I'm a photographer by vocation," he says, "but it's also my avocation. My whole life is making pictures."

About ten years ago he began thinking about putting together a book on a favorite subject: the American Southwest. But not the sweeping vista, majestic landscape American Southwest. His pictures from trips from his native Vancouver to Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah were images of the strange remains of a bygone era. "My favorite pictures that resulted from the trips that started 30 years ago weren't of the Grand Canyon or Monument Valley or other natural wonders," Rob says. "They were of some of the decrepit places I found out in the middle of nowhere—the abandoned gas stations and old rusty signs."

When in the early 2000s he began to travel to the Four Corners area to capture more images for the book, he realized that his subjects were disappearing. "Every time I went down there I'd find less and less of the quirky vernacular. It was being torn down and replaced. What used to be a mom-and-pop motel business with a funky old sign outside with a cowboy on it, next trip would be a Best Western or a Holiday Inn."

So he stepped up the pace. "No matter where I was, in Utah or New Mexico or Arizona or Colorado, I would see a lot of the same kinds of things—certainly the idea of the Native American, the cowboy, the frontier, and because a lot of bomb testing and nuclear research was done down there, a lot of roadside missiles."

While he captured a good number of landscape views, Rob's tendency was not to try to show a whole lot in any one image. "I like to go in and crop pretty tight just to create a bit of an abstraction, to focus on something and try to make it even a little more strange."