Historic Route 66 in Williams

Author's Comments

The signs come on around dusk, and that is the only hour I want to be here. Williams in the half-light, when the sky over the San Francisco Peaks goes from cobalt to indigo and the neon starts to assert itself one storefront at a time, is the photograph I drove up for. Earlier than that and the signs read flat against a bright sky. Later and you lose the gradient that makes the whole frame work. The window is maybe twenty minutes. I shoot the wide shot first, looking east down the main drag with the signs receding into perspective and the last warm light still on the mountains behind. Then I work the details. The Grand Canyon Hotel sign. The Route 66 shield painted on the asphalt. A particular diner window where the interior glow and the exterior neon meet at the glass and do something I cannot quite predict from one visit to the next. A tripod is worth bringing. The exposures get long quickly once true blue hour arrives, and the slight motion of a passing car becomes a streak of red taillight that does more for the composition than a clean frame would. Williams is not undiscovered. There are tourists, and there is a certain amount of curated nostalgia, and you have to make peace with both. But the bones of the place are real. This was the last town on the route to surrender to the interstate, and that stubbornness still shows in the architecture and the signage and the way the street feels at night. Come on a weekday if you can. Stay through full dark. The signs only get better as the sky deepens.

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