Texas Hold em

Andrew Kuykendall – Truck Stop, Texas

Kuykendall captures a now-silent truck stop somewhere deep in the desert. The image has a raw immediacy, as if the viewer were there in the very second it flashed past the car window—a fleeting intersection of landscape, architecture, and memory. Though the place is no longer open, the weathered signs and structures bear witness to decades of travelers who once passed through.

There is an echo here of the great American tradition of road documentary photography, from Robert Frank to Stephen Shore, where the banal becomes mythic, and the forgotten edges of the highway turn into symbols of time itself. Kuykendall’s framing carries the eerie stillness of a Coen Brothers tableau—No Country for Old Men comes to mind—where the desert feels charged with fate, silence, and the possibility of violence just beyond the frame. At the same time, the photograph resonates with the existential play between presence and absence that recalls Ingmar Bergman’s meditations on death: the stark reminder that all places, like all lives, eventually slip into memory.

Printed with Kuykendall’s signature attention to craft, the work transcends documentation; it is a cinematic fragment, a memento mori wrapped in Texan dust.