A cloud somewhere near Tucumcari, NM
Joanna Pocock on photography and memory
Like clockwork, the question I find myself asking when I see a compelling image is: What’s the story behind this picture?
That’s what I thought when Joanna Pocock shared this cloud photo on X a few weeks ago. Joanna is a photographer and writer, so I asked if she would elaborate on the picture’s backstory and she graciously agreed. Photographs contain multitudes, and Joanna’s certainly does.
The thing I love most about this piece are the low-res digital images. Joanna wrote this when she emailed them to me:
All photos were taken with a crappy digital camera and are lo-res, so I hope you're OK with that!
It’s funny to think that we might second-guess this lower quality picture but it makes sense — We live in an HD world, right? Joanna’s fuzzy pictures recall so many hazy camera memories from our youth and younger days. I hope you appreciate her essay as much as I do. it’s a lovely piece of writing. I’ll let Joanna take it from here. Let us know what you think in the comments. Enjoy!
It was 2006. I had suffered several miscarriages, and I was at a loss. I had always imagined that my life would contain a child. That didn’t seem to be happening. So, I decided to do something I couldn’t have done with the proverbial babe in arms: I flew from London to Toronto, where I got a train to Detroit and then bought a cross-country Greyhound ticket, which would get me to Los Angeles.
At the time, I was writing a novel about a teenage girl from Napanee, Ontario (not far from my hometown of Ottawa) who heads to Las Vegas to look for her estranged mother. I had spent several months in Vegas in 2005 working on a documentary with my husband, and the city was looming large in my imagination. In fact, Vegas was where I had my second miscarriage. We had been filming on the roof of a parking garage in temperatures hovering around 115 degrees Fahrenheit. I was feeling extra sick that day from the heat. When we returned to the motel where we lived, I lay down to rest. That’s when the bleeding started. My third miscarriage was several months later in London. Shortly after, my husband handed me a thousand pounds and encouraged me to head off somewhere.
Movement always makes me happy. I fled with a notebook, a crappy digital camera, a small Olympus point-and-shoot, and a backpack with a few changes of clothing.
The photo of the cloud was taken on a Greyhound bus between Amarillo, Texas, and Albuquerque, somewhere near Tucumcari, New Mexico.
My diary from that day reads:
April 13, 2006
Early morning:
There was a middle-aged Japanese man in the Amarillo Greyhound station this morning. He was wearing a Tilly hat and bright white socks and running shoes. His English was shaky, but he ordered a fish sandwich and a pickle at the concession stand. He seemed intrepid.
1:00 pm
The bus stopped at Tucumcari. The stop was a MacDonald’s and a ‘fast food cluster.’ As we passed the Texas border, the driver told us to set our watches back by an hour.
Passed through Santa Rosa, NM. The ground has gone from flat and featureless to rocky, scrubby, minty desert. Red soil. Very few clouds. Everything looks stripped back to its essence. The bus is only half full, which is a relief. I am enjoying the quiet after the loud, crowded bus from Tulsa to Amarillo.
Got to Albuquerque at 4:00 pm (5:00 pm Texas time) and there are a few clouds now.
Clouds feature in my diary often. Partly because the skies are so big in the U.S. that you can watch them gather and shapeshift. They make for great theater from the seat of a Greyhound. Back in 2006, before we were addicted to our devices, we noticed things like clouds. There was a sense of us all seeing the same thing, as opposed to being glued to our individual screens, algorithms tailored to our specific wants and needs. Even one solitary cloud somewhere near Tucumcari can become imbued with meaning when more than one person looks at it. It becomes something to be observed, considered, thought about, spoken about.
There is so much we no longer see, consider, or talk about.
When I was going through my photos from 2006 to decide which ones to include in my next book, Greyhound, something about this cloud stopped me. Something about it that – like the Japanese man with his fish sandwich and pickle – seemed intrepid. Several people commented when I posted it on social media, which surprised me. It seemed to touch something. It struck a chord.
I like taking photographs from moving vehicles. I like the element of surprise you get when you capture still moments while you are in motion. As a teenager, I remember discovering Walker Evans’s subway portraits and wondering, ‘Are you allowed to do that?’ I am not so daring. I wouldn’t feel comfortable photographing a person without their knowledge. But a cloud is different. I wonder who else was with me on that bus, looking at this one small cloud. Where are they now? Do they remember this moment? Probably not. But that’s not what matters. What matters is that we were all together for one moment, all gazing out the window of a Greyhound bus, marveling at a small cloud, sharing something. We were not lost in our own individual worlds; we were part of each others’.
About the author
Joanna Pocock is a Canadian author living in London, England. Her writing and photographs have appeared in many publications, notably the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, Dazed & Confused, and Guardian US.
Her first book, Surrender, a blend of memoir and environmental writing, was illustrated with photographs taken over two years while living in Montana. It was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2019, House of Anansi (Canada and the US) in 2020, and has been translated into French (Mémoire d’encrier) and Spanish (Errata Naturae).
Her next book, Greyhound, combines reportage, environmental writing, memoir, and photography. It is being published in 2025 by Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK) and Soft Skull (US).
Lyrical, melancholy, and piercing all at once. It's not easy to match word for picture for word, but Joanna has, and a big thanks to Andy for stopping his media flow to ask the right questions. It's the journey right, and not the destination...
First thing I want to say, is no matter what the gear, when you have the eye you have the eye. Every image grabbed me. As a fellow fan of taking pictures from moving vehicles, I noted it from the first photo right away. I loved being introduced to Joanna's work. Thank you!