Soul of a City

Several years ago, I started photo weblog, even funnier, started it as a joke, an answer to Austin City Limits, my site, Bexar County Line, as a collection of random images, trying to define the Soul of a City.

San Antonio de Bexar, bigger than Dallas and more laid back than Austin, that defines the city in a single catchphrase.

Then again, I’ve been looking for that single image that so accurately defines the soul of a city. That site’s had an image a day since June of 2007*, with no shortage of material, and the hunt for the soul of a city goes ever onward.

Yesterday morning, I walked to Blanco Cafe (the original) in downtown San Antonio for some breakfast. Been, what, maybe more than a year since I’ve been there. Outside, on the windows of the cafe, there’s art. Window decoration is peculiar form of transient folk art, and I’ve gradually cataloged some of the local material. Still, in a single moment, I finally caught what I was looking for, an ephemeral, timeless yet pointed image that captures the essence of this village, this town, this city, this place in the universe.

Soul of a City

From the tattoos, to rose-colored eye shadow, to flashing dark eyes under a mane of black tresses, the smiling and mysterious brown eyes, the sway of the ample hips, all of it.

There has to be a single image, a single element that binds this together. One picture to adequately grasp the soul of a city.

I’ve yet to find another image that so eloquently connects the disparate bits to bind together the soul of a city.

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