While visiting this legendary roadhouse along old route US 66, I made images in both color and black and white to study the difference in both effect and meaning. This café served as the location for 1988 German film that has become a cult classic, and it continues to draw European tourists visiting the Mohave Desert. The café staff is used to cameras by now – in fact, I shared breakfast here with 19 fellow photographers participating in Route 66 Image Quest workshop led by pbase artist Dave Wyman and Ken Rockwell. ( See: http://home.comcast.net/~wymanburke/Route66.html )

I spent very little time eating at the cafe, and a lot of time shooting its interior and exterior with two cameras. I used my Panasonic FZ-30 for color travel photos (click on thumbnail below ) and a Leica D-Lux 2 for a black and white photojournalistic approach. I appreciated my color images for what color had to say, and I savored the black and white images for taking me back to the 50s again. This photojournalistic image could have easily been made here in the 50s (except for that beer, which would not have cost $3.00, and smoking would have been more welcome. Needless to say, I would have shot it with tri-x film.) We tend to recall our own past through the pictures we have made and seen, and photos of the 50s probably looked very much like this one.