The Magic Camera

The Pecos River begins as snowmelt, high in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains northeast of Santa Fe. The river, shallow and slow-moving, might very easily be dismissed as a creek, were it located almost anywhere else, but in the arid deserts of New Mexico, it is undeniably, undoubtedly, indisputably a river.

For 926 miles, from the Sangre de Cristos in the north, to Carlsbad in the south, to its junction with the Rio Grande in southwestern Texas, the Pecos River winds steadily southward, through mountains and desert, ranchland and towns, cottonwood bosques and limestone cliffs. Over the centuries, the Pecos has quenched the thirsts of enormous herds of buffalo, coursed past the once-thriving Pecos Pueblo, and likely slipped beneath New Mexico’s very first bridge—a wooden span built by explorer Francisco Vásquez de Coronado’s 1540 expedition. The river has been called the Río Cicuyé and the Río Salado, been dubbed the River of Cows and the River of Sin, and throughout the mid-to-late-1800s, to head “West of the Pecos” meant heading west of all things safe and civilized.

In its long and winding course through centuries and the desert, the Pecos River has tangled inextricably with the lives and fates of natives, explorers, colonists, cattlemen, miners, oilmen, lawmen, travelers, outlaws, cowboys, preachers, and buffalo hunters—flowing in and out of folklore and legend and history. Long ago, a giant serpent rumored to have been as thick around as an ox was said to have escaped into the river from a chamber beneath the pueblo. In the 1870s, self-proclaimed prophet Hugh Leeper, the “Sanctified Texan,” prophesied that the river would rise up and flood a certain adobe saloon in Fort Sumner, in the east-central part of the state, which allegedly it did. And, in 2001, a photographer named Farrell Eaves unintentionally knocked a camera into the river’s waters, reached in to get it, and pulled out a miracle.

From 1994 to 2003, former National Geographic photographer Bruce Dale taught a week-long advanced photography class he called the Pecos River Photographic Workshop, at a tiny retreat near the river’s headwaters. Farrell Eaves—a then-sixty-eight-year-old Tennessean, retired safety engineer, Korean War veteran, and talented amateur photographer—took part in the workshop in August of 2001, excitedly learning how to better use his recently acquired Nikon Coolpix 990, a fairly expensive digital camera given him by his son. Toward the end of the workshop, with a group of fellow photographers at the Iron Gate Campground north of Pecos, Eaves set up his camera on a tripod by the river. A man stood fly-fishing in the water, others milled about, and Eaves stood intently on the riverbank, studying a clump of potentially photogenic river grass. Without noticing what he had done, Eaves bumped into his camera, knocking both it and its tripod over.

The camera fell. It hit a rock. It splashed into the river. It sank.

“Farrell, your camera!” shouted a female classmate.

The camera sank deeper into the river, its memory card compartment clacked open, and if even a single part of its internal workings hadn’t already been completely soaked, within a moment it was. Eaves waded unhappily into the river, recovered his camera and tripod and memory card, and dried them all off with a handkerchief. When he shook the camera, it sloshed. Its lens and flash and viewfinder, its monitor and its control panel, all fogged completely over from inside.

“Of course, it was totally waterlogged,” Eaves said, in a recent personal interview. “I immediately tried to take a picture—and it was hopeless.”

Bruce Dale, who had had to deal with wet cameras on innumerable occasions while shooting for National Geographic, suggested Eaves at least dry out the camera. Eaves set the camera in his car, with the car’s windows rolled up, hoping the sun would help bake it dry. He blasted it with compressed air, set it near a gas stove’s pilot light for several nights, and even sped around the desert for days with the camera tied to his windshield, with onlookers laughing at the sight. A phone call to Nikon revealed it would be at least $300 to replace even a single part, and Eaves began thinking his approximately $800 camera would have to be thrown away.

Finally, a week after the incident, the lens and the viewfinder of the camera cleared. Eaves pointed it at a random wooden chair in a Pecos coffee shop, pressed the shutter release button, and stared in awe at the camera’s screen.

“I took a picture,” Eaves said. “And when I saw what it did, I felt it all the way to my toes. Well, the only thing I could compare it with was when I had back surgery and was given morphine for the pain. …It was, as the kids say, a rush.”

What the camera did was to take pictures unlike any that anyone had ever taken before. The camera, baptized and reborn, now changed every color, added auras of hazy light, and flooded skies and surfaces with kaleidoscopic streaks and bands of startling brightness. It took normal photography and turned it into something more like abstract impressionism, using pastel shades, wild bursts of neon, and a strangely two-dimensional feeling.

The camera failed to work well in bright light, and its flash never recovered, but when the camera did work, the images it created made its shortcomings irrelevant. Everyday buildings rose stark and black against skies of rainbow-colored static. Winter trees and windmills bled streaks of blood and oil. Sunsets became malignant and terrifying, and almost everything the camera took in became strange and wonderful, causing many people viewing its images to ponder the natures of perception and reality, the differences between what we see and what is.

“From then on, I called [the camera] a ‘she,’ because she may or may not perform at any time,” Eaves said. “She has a mind of her own. Hardly any functions of the camera work. It’s just very temperamental. She is.”

The amazing changes in the camera may have also been caused in part by its period of drying out—in particular by the heat of the stove which may have warped the camera’s sensors.

“Scrambled electronics,” was Bruce Dale’s verdict.

Dale has also suggested that the high elevation of Iron Gate Campground and the salinity of the Pecos River could have been factors in the super-powered camera’s origin story.

Bill Haddad, Sales Manager of Kurt’s Camera Corral in Albuquerque, suggested recently that “the image processor may be fried. Basically, that’s a small computer inside your camera that processes the light that comes in.”

Farrell Eaves himself sees something miraculous in it all, citing the way his camera adds a feeling of otherworldly spirituality to religious items and scenes, the way it transforms the rooms of his hometown Methodist church, the walls of New Mexico’s ancient missions, certain altar vestments—and everything else.

“I was asked by a reporter, ‘Do you think God pushed the camera in the water?’” Eaves said. “‘Well, no, I did.’ But if you look at the images of churches in the Southwest and so forth, there’s no doubt in my mind that God had a lot to do with drying it out.”

Whatever the cause of the camera’s uniqueness—whether an unseen deity with an interest in digital photography, or the camera’s having been dropped into a river—the phenomenon has certainly changed Eaves’s life. Since the camera’s metamorphosis, Eaves’s surrealistic images have emerged as the subject of countless newspaper and magazine articles—including features in Wired and the Associated Press. He has shared his photos in numerous lectures across North America, seen them featured in galleries and art shows, and had his work published in PC Photo, Outdoor Photographer, and National Geographic. His serendipitously altered images have made their way onto framed prints, onto postcards, onto greeting cards, and—after Eaves proved to his stunned publisher that they weren’t at all Photoshopped—into Mr. Eaves and His Magic Camera, a visually stunning little book co-written with author Cindy Cashman for Andrews McMeel Publishing.

(Cashman, using the pseudonym Dr. Alan Francis, also authored Everything Men Know About Women—a completely blank 128-page book that sold more than a million copies—and is planning later in 2008 to become the first woman to get married in outer space.)

“Who knows why Farrell’s camera fell into the river that day, and who knows what happened inside that makes it do its magic,” Cashman wrote in the preface to their coauthored book. “…What matters is that what was once ordinary is now extraordinary because a man was willing to find the good in something that seemed like nothing but an expensive accident at the time.”

Farrell Eaves came to New Mexico as a man entering retirement, and left with one of the most interesting chapters of his life suddenly still to come. He came here as a hobbyist, and left as an artist. He came here with a camera, and left with something truly unique.

“It really has transformed him,” said Bruce Dale, laughing good-naturedly. “Farrell wears a beret now!”

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If you enjoy My Strange New Mexico, be sure to check out "My Strange New Mexico: Roswell Edition," by John LeMay.  John LeMay's latest column asks: was Billy the Kid also a treasure hunter?

And, you may want to get a copy of the newly published crypozoology book entitled Boss Snakes: Stories and Sightings of Giant Snakes in North America, by Chad Arment, which may very well be the first book to cite a "My Strange New Mexico" column as a source.