The Inside Rail
Forty years ago, horse-racing was the most popular spectator sport in America. Around that time, I ponied a horse on the exercise track at Arlington park, and that glimpse of a world apart left an indelible impression. Decades later, beginning in 2003, I returned to photograph at The Downs at Albuquerque, a Thoroughbred and Quarter Horse racetrack at the New Mexico state fairgrounds. I found much to be unchanged. Focusing on the people, horses, and trappings of ordinary life at the track, I chose black and white film and silver gelatin prints to suggest the look of photographs from the heyday of racing which even now hang on the walls of The Jockey Club at The Downs. By exploring racetrack culture more deeply, I found fragments of the past and also came to understand more fully the fundamental incoherence of horse-racing and its decline into a business that considers horses as "product" and that increasingly depends on casinos to provide revenue in the present. Even so, many small and mid-level tracks have closed. The future of The Downs is uncertain. For now, vestiges of the old days exist in the shadows of the grandstand that overlooks the finish line, and it is my aim to record these fragments while they remain because, in spite of the odds, true horsemen and women endure, and for them, the horse still matters.