Postcard from Bisbee – Quirkiness Lives

Sometimes when I write these blogs, I don’t know whether to act as a tour guide, or as an artist showing off his work. Bisbee, AZ created such a dilemma for me. Here is why:

First, Bisbee is a fascinating town right out of the old west, located 78 miles southeast of Tucson, 24 miles south of Tombstone, and barely north of the Mexican border. It is built on hills. Bisbee was originally founded as a mining town for copper, gold and silver. Just south of town there is a huge open pit mine that attests to its history. That was then.

Today, Bisbee is many other things:

It is an artist community; an out-of-the-way tourist destination that doesn’t feel like it was built for tourists; a town filled with stairs of all shapes and sizes, short and long; a city of incredible colors, strange houses, and narrow backstreets; a former haven to hippies and John Wayne; a current home for gays and one of the top Gay Pride celebrations in America; a place where the weather is much cooler than Tucson; and runner-up as the quirkiest town in America as voted by the AARP magazine.

In short, it is a place you want to keep coming back to.

For me, it was all those things and more. It is a photographer’s dream. Here I wandered and photograph at will…never running out of subjects. The colors and the quirkiness are wonderful and they are everywhere you look.

There is a storefront covered in bottle tops, another store with a bomb for a sign, an empty lot filled with rubble and sculpture that is an ad hoc park, art galleries of all kinds, and the colors….my God, the colors. As a photographer, you dream of finding these places…and I did.

In the next couple of installments, I will be sharing more of Bisbee. But don’t expect normal photographs…oh no. Bisbee inspires creativity and many of my photographs have turned into creativity personified. And I haven’t even started painting them yet.

Needless to say I will be back here for more photography and creative ventures. So, to answer my dilemma from the opening sentence, I suppose this blog entry is the tour guide part of my trip to Bisbee. Stay tuned for the artistic parts.