At a slower pace, serial pedestrian Zac Crain found unexpected beauty in Dallas… and the source of downtown’s cookie smell

Dallas can be a difficult place to walk to, but don’t tell Zac Crain. The author and editor of D magazine has spent the last four years exploring every last street and alley of the city, journeys that he has documented in photographs that emphasize form, light and shadow to find beauty in places, that you may not have noticed.

These images are collected in a new book, A Pedestrian’s Recent History of Dallas, published this month by La Reunion, a division of the local independent Deep Vellum devoted to books about Dallas. Dallas Morning News architecture critic Mark Lamster, himself a die-hard pedestrian, spoke to Crain about his book:

Zac Crain photographed at his home in Dallas, June 24, 2009.(Jason Janik / 141615)

ML: What I love about this book is how to find beauty in the everyday city. This is not a book of beauty shots of iconic buildings. Was it part of your goal here to show that downtown Dallas – despite its reputation for being ugly and inhospitable – can also be a place of visual delight?

ZC: Absolutely. I had been walking around for a while before I really started taking photos and every day I saw something that really impressed me. Sometimes it was intentional and sometimes it was a wonderful accident that happened to me. I wanted the book to reflect both and show that Dallas really is.

ML: That reminds me of a nice passage from your introduction. “You can never stop looking when you want to see. Nothing is ever the same. ”So what have you changed in the years you made the book?

ZC: One thing that struck me as we finalized the layout was how many locations I had shot that no longer existed. When I look at these photos it feels like they disappeared in a blink of an eye, but most of them that I saw day after day, little by little, disappear. On another level, there’s one place I’d go at least once a week – the little pedestrian bridge over the triple underpass. You look directly at the city. And what you see is never the same. The sky is bluer. The sun hits the buildings in a different way. It affects your mood. You can always see the same view in a new way.

ML: You write that you are self-taught as a photographer and that this book was a learning process. How has it changed your perception of the city?

ZC: The only thing I knew about photography was something I remember from my boyfriend [Dallas photographer] Allison V. Smith says (not to me): Find your light. I think that kind of search drew me around town at times. Sometimes the light reveals things; sometimes it reveals things by dwarfing them. It made me stop and think about what I was looking at from every possible angle.

Dallas editor Zac Crain turned his walks around Dallas into a sleek new photo book published by Deep Vellum that captures interesting details, colors, and perspectives of the architecture. His pictures appear in the book “A Pedestrian’s Recent History of Dallas”, edited by Deep Vellum.(Zac Crain)

ML: Good advice. My own urban photography leads to interesting conversations. What was the funniest or most remarkable thing someone said to you on one of your walks?

ZC: Well, a lot of the time people stop and turn around and look at what I’m trying to see and look at me kind of confused. When I run I’m kind of in my own little world so I don’t have a lot of conversations. What I often get, or what I have done, is someone text me and say, “Hey, that person who yelled at you and honked at you was me.”

ML: One of the things you reportedly discovered is why downtown often smells like cookies. What gives?

ZC: I should get people to study for themselves, but I’ll give it away: It’s the Hines Nut Company over on St. Paul. It’s a wholesaler, and when things go well the whole area smells like a pan of freshly baked cookies.

Dallas editor Zac Crain turned his walks around Dallas into a sleek new photo book published by Deep Vellum that captures interesting details, colors, and perspectives of the architecture. His pictures appear in the book “A Pedestrian’s Recent History of Dallas”, edited by Deep Vellum.(Zac Crain)

ML: Last thought: you walked all the streets of the city. What is one specific thing the city could do to improve it?

ZC: Widen every sidewalk in the downtown area, and when you do, add bike lanes everywhere. Makes the streets quieter and gives motorists, cyclists and pedestrians the same weight. And outlaw turn right on red. It just leaves the drivers looking for their first opportunity. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve almost been hit and then yelled at by a driver who never even looked in my direction.

ML: Amen.

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$ 20 from store.deepvellum.org

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