A communal retreat in West Texas led a Georgia photographer to follow a friend’s advice and embrace idle time, deepening her experiences as a mother and an artist. The Bitter Southerner asked her how she reached this crossroads in the creative process.
Photographs by Rinne Allen
Locals call it the prettiest road in America. Travelers can decide for themselves when they take this stretch of Pinto Canyon Road near Marfa, Texas, heading into the Southwest.
1 / Permission to wander. Rinne, is this a new mantra? A new way of moving through the world?
Well, it started five years ago when I went on an artist’s retreat in West Texas, but yes, it is definitely a new way of moving through the world. … My friend, the artist Hope Hilton, used the phrase “permission to wander” years ago for one of her projects, and it really stuck with me. I think many of us don’t allow ourselves idle time … permission to be idle. We think we have to fill most every hour with productivity. Deciding to give myself permission to wander — without a set outcome, destination, or expectation — has been a turning point in my creative process and in my role as a mother of young children. It is now a vital part of my seasonal rhythm. I take time every few months to step away and just be quiet, and I come back feeling full … of ideas and inspiration, but also like my tank is full … ready for whatever comes next. I truly feel like it helps me be a better photographer and mother.
Rinne Allen says she and a group of creative women on a West Texas retreat “started every day with coffee and ended each day with a communal meal, most of the time cooked over a fire. Each day we spent some time together and some time on our own.”
2 / This journey started when you attended a workshop with a group of incredible creative women. What was that all about?
In 2017, I headed to West Texas to rendezvous with a handful of creative women from across the country for five days of retreat, conversation, dreaming, and visioning. These women — designer Natalie “Alabama” Chanin, singer-songwriter Tift Merritt, and … [radio producers] Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva [aka The Kitchen Sisters] — gathered at the behest of hotelier Liz Lambert, who invited us all to come to Marfa [Texas] to sleep in tents under the stars, explore the Chihuahuan Desert, daydream, and wander. We started every day with coffee and ended each day with a communal meal, most of the time cooked over a fire. Each day we spent some time together and some time on our own. Each person had to tend to a little bit of work that week. Tift recorded vocals for a song, Natalie led a sewing workshop, and Davia and Nikki met with the local radio station to talk about field recordings and oral histories, and I, too, led a workshop, but for the most part, we just wandered. The experience of weaving in and out of time with each other and with the unique area around Marfa and the pace of the place was rejuvenating and refreshing. Our idea exchange was inspired by the experience of our days — it was funny, we weren’t “doing” a whole lot, but at the end of each day we had so much to share. I think our minds were able to open up just enough for new seeds to settle in.
Each trip to West Texas includes time spent alone in Big Bend National Park, Allen says. There aren’t many feelings comparable to that of seeing the Rio Grande flow by, with sheepherders and their flocks and horses on the other side. It makes her question how anyone could ever put a wall there, she says.
3 / Tell us more about the pull of West Texas.
Some people talk about energy vortexes … places that have intense energy that you can feel when you are there. I have visited a few of these places … and … never felt anything. But in West Texas there is something energetic that happens to me. I notice this feeling in me when I go to certain places, and it reinforces the idea that I have that certain places are like organisms … living and breathing. Some places resonate with me and some don’t. West Texas is the desert, yes, but there is just enough green out there to feel familiar and more approachable than barren desert. There is the geology of the place and the topography of it, but also its proximity to the Rio Grande gives the area south of I-10 the feeling of being at the edge … knowing that another country lay just on the other side of this fluid border is very intriguing to me. The time I have spent along the Rio Grande makes me emphatically question how anyone could ever put a wall there. It is just so beautiful and unspoiled.
There is a magic to Big Bend, Allen says. It feels like the edge of the Earth.
4 / Shooting in new places, from the lushness of the Deep South to the high desert — we imagine your eye has to shift a bit. Has West Texas changed how you look through the camera?
Oh, yes. There is big sky out there and wide vistas … a quiet drama. Not as loud as other areas further out west, though, which I like. When I am in the South, I feel my eye sees in a more intimate way … a more familiar way. When I am in West Texas, I notice the novel and the different. I try to bring home with me the moments that would only happen out there. I tend to photograph a few details, like what is under my feet or over my head just to remember them, and also, the freedom of being alone allows me to just pull over my car or stop in the middle of the open road and take a picture. When I travel with others, I don’t always feel like I have this flexibility to follow what I see.
In the early 1970s, artist Donald Judd moved to Marfa from New York City, choosing the small crossroads as his base because, as he once wrote, you “can’t do anything very large and serious in the middle of society.” Over the course of two decades, Judd created and installed work in buildings he rehabilitated in downtown Marfa as well as in the desert. His work draws visitors from all over the world who come to see what can happen when you have space to work, and to think. Pictured is Judd’s library in his home in Marfa.
5 / What feels familiar? Folks in Marfa say y’all, right?
They do! The people feel very familiar. … You ... hear lots of Spanish, too. There are no big towns out there until you hit El Paso, so most folks operate in a friendly way, saying hello to you on the street as you pass by, etc. There are pickup trucks, but more cowboy hats and boots behind their wheels. Marfa is still very much a small town [less than 2,000 people] ... in spite of it being fairly well-known in certain circles, especially in art ones, because of the artist Donald Judd having lived there for so long. The rural area, combined with the art and culture created by Judd, remind me of my hometown, Athens, Georgia; with Athens, you have this 200-year-old fabric of a place with the overlay of the music scene that began in the late ’70s with the B-52’s and R.E.M. [in the early ’80s]. … Marfa has a mix like this, too … different cultures coexisting — it creates quite a mashup, but to me, it is the best of both worlds.
This story was published in Issue No. 1 of The Bitter Southerner magazine.
Rinne Allen is a photographer living in Athens, Georgia, who documents process as a way to visually demonstrate the effort that goes into creating things. Rinne spends most of her days collaborating with chefs, farmers, artisans, designers, and researchers to document their work and the process that goes into making it, with the hope that those who view her pictures will learn something from them.
