Relics 2015: Gas & Groceries

Mike Cooper ran into a problem on a trip down Route 66. “I got interested in all the places that aren’t really there any more,” said Cooper. “But then I’d take a picture; and when I’d look at it, it didn’t look very cool.” 

Back home, Cooper saw other photographers’ captures of the same sites that had stopped him on the road. “That’s what I had envisioned [my pictures] should look like,” said Cooper. So he became a student, learning techniques for long exposure and theatrical lighting and soon drawing his vivid impressions into the camera’s frame.

Cooper trains his camera on Louisiana landmarks now, with midnight sojourns to St. Gabriel Church, Fort Pike, and other structures more blemished by weather and neglect. His long exposures average three minutes, and Cooper takes care to light the buildings just so. 

For a successful exposure, Cooper ventures out for a few days surrounding the full moon; he uses its light as well as a protomachine—“Basically a fancy flashlight”—which colors and illuminates the scene at once, to an “otherworldly” end. 

As an insurance adjuster, Cooper has an advantage in hunting down new spots to shoot. “I was working when I found that gas station in Ville Platte,” he said. “I wrote down the intersection so I could find it in the dark.” 

But a well-lit place is no friend to Cooper’s long exposures. On a trip last year to St. Gabriel Church, the landmark’s spotlights proved a nuisance to his camera. He grabbed coveralls from his vehicle and used them to block out the light. “But then I started smelling something … I thought, It’s so late! I can’t believe someone’s out cooking! But no, it was my coveralls on fire. I threw them in a ditch and put them out.” 

View more of Mike Cooper’s nocturnal work at flickr.com/photos/49954558@N05. Details on Relics 2015, our yearlong photography series, can be found here.