Taylor, Texas, and the Quiet Theatre of Ordinary Things

Davis Grocery & BBQ

There was no grand plan.

On Sunday, after checking the local events in Georgetown and finding nothing worth leaving the house for, Joe, Ian, and I decided to make a quick run to Taylor. We left around noon with cameras, mild curiosity, and the loose optimism photographers carry when there is no assignment, no client, and no promise that anything interesting will happen.

That is part of the pleasure.

A camera gives you permission to wander. It also gives you an excuse to look twice at what most people pass once.

Ian had looked up a couple of places for lunch, and we decided to start at Davis Grocery & BBQ. From the outside, the place made no theatrical claims. No polished storefront. No fashionable branding. No calculated rustic charm. Just an unassuming metal building with a sign, two small windows with metal grilles, and a couple of wooden picnic benches under the shade of a tree.

Only one car sat outside.

For a moment, we were not sure it was open at all.

We walked in anyway, and the day improved immediately.

Inside, Davis Grocery felt plain in the way honest places often do. Drink refrigerators stood to the left, the food counter sat up front, and a few benches and grocery shelves occupied the rest of the room. It was not designed for Instagram, which made it far more interesting to me. Nothing felt curated or overly arranged. The place simply existed, and the smell of barbecue made a convincing argument that we had made the right decision.

Behind the counter, James Davis Jr., the owner and pitmaster, was helping a couple with their order. A woman who worked there came in from outside and began helping us with ours. The pace was unhurried. Not inefficient, just human. Orders were taken carefully. They prepared food with patience. Nobody seemed interested in hurrying the afternoon along.

I ordered a beef sausage wrap and a small side of pinto beans. Since I do not eat pork, good beef sausage always feels like a small victory. The food was delicious, especially the beans, rich with pieces of brisket. It was simple food with the authority of something made by someone who knows exactly what he is doing.

Then Ian grabbed a can of RC Cola from the fridge.

That little blue-and-red can felt like an artifact from another century. I had not seen Royal Crown Cola in years, certainly not in the grocery stores I visit. I went back to the car to get a few dollars from my camera bag, and while I was there, I grabbed my camera too.

By then, James had stepped outside and was sitting on the bench under the tree.

This is the kind of moment photographers hope for, though we rarely admit it out loud. Not a dramatic moment. Not a cinematic one. Just a person in his place, surrounded by the quiet evidence of his work.

I told him I was a portrait photographer and asked if I could make a quick portrait of him with the store sign. He kindly agreed.

The light was terrible.

It was a little after 1 p.m., and the sun was high, harsh, and indifferent to my artistic ambitions. No soft shadows. No flattering glow. No studio control. But sometimes the dignity of the subject matters more than the perfection of the light. I had my 58mm Voigtlander lens on the Nikon and made two quick frames.

Later, I learned more about him. A Taylor native, he rose from humble beginnings, worked more than 20 years in retail grocery, and eventually opened a business in the same community that shaped his own life. His store was even featured on The Daytripper on PBS.

I like knowing that now.

At the time, I only knew that he had fed us well, treated us kindly, and allowed me a brief portrait under an unforgiving Texas sun. That was enough.

Sometimes a good photograph begins not with perfect light, but with permission.

Old Taylor High

After lunch, we drove over to Old Taylor High.

The 1923 high school has been reimagined as a campus of shops, studios, eateries, and gathering spaces. The idea itself is beautiful. Instead of demolishing the old building and erasing its memory, someone chose to preserve it, reinterpret it, and let it live another life.

I have a deep affection for places that have survived their first purpose.

Old schools, warehouses, grocery stores, downtowns: they all carry a kind of visual residue. Their walls remember things. Their hallways hold echoes. Their proportions belong to a different time. Even when they are renovated, repainted, and repurposed, they retain some stubborn trace of what they used to be.

Because it was Sunday, most of the shops at Old Taylor High were closed. Only a few people lingered, and the halls were quiet.

For a shopper, that might have been disappointing.

For a photographer, it was a gift.

Empty hallways have a strange power. They make you aware of geometry, repetition, silence, and scale. You start noticing the way a corridor narrows into the distance, the way a doorway frames another doorway, the way light brushes across a wall without asking anyone to admire it.

I photographed the interior hallways and the exterior architecture, especially the older 1950s character of the building. Nothing spectacular was happening. No grand event. No performance. No crowd.

But that is precisely where photography becomes interesting to me.

The obvious subject is easy. A parade tells you where to look. A sunset insists upon itself. A beautiful model under controlled light does half the work before you ever press the shutter.

But an empty hallway asks more of you.

You have to bring attention to it. You have to decide that the ordinary has enough presence to deserve a frame. You have to believe that a quiet place can still hold a story.

Old Taylor High felt like that. Not a museum. Not a school anymore. Not merely a shopping center. It felt like a building in its second act, still carrying the grammar of classrooms and corridors, but now speaking in the language of small businesses, artists, food, and community.

A new story inside an old structure.

That is always worth photographing.

Downtown Taylor

After Old Taylor High, we headed into downtown Taylor.

By then, the afternoon had turned hot and humid in that very Texas way where the air begins to feel personal. The sun was no longer a light source. It was an adversary. Most of the shops were closed, the streets were quiet, and the romance of walking with a camera had begun negotiating with the practical reality of sweat.

Still, Taylor had not run out of things to show us.

I photographed old buildings, warehouse windows, glass panes, metal frames, and the kinds of architectural fragments that can look insignificant until the camera isolates them. A sheet of glass in an old window. A weathered metal pattern. A facade that had outlived its original purpose. I was drawn to the small, stubborn details that remain after commerce has moved on, paint has faded, and history has stopped introducing itself politely.

This is what I enjoy most about walking with a camera.

Photography is not always about finding beauty in the conventional sense. Sometimes it is about finding evidence. Evidence that people worked here, built here, sold things here, waited here, passed through here, and left marks behind.

The camera does not merely record what is beautiful. In the right hands, it can dignify what is overlooked.

Eventually, the heat drove us into a few antique stores, partly for curiosity and partly for mercy. Antique stores are their own little museums of forgotten usefulness. Objects sit quietly, detached from their original owners, waiting for someone else to imagine a second life for them.

In that sense, they belonged perfectly to the day.

A grocery store still serving its community. A school reborn as a gathering place. Old downtown buildings holding their ground in the heat. Antiques waiting for another chapter. Taylor, at least for that afternoon, felt less like a destination and more like a meditation on endurance.

By around 3 p.m., we had walked enough, sweated enough, eaten well, and made enough photographs. We called it a day and headed back to Georgetown.

It was a short trip. Three hours, more or less. Nothing monumental happened. No itinerary was conquered. No famous landmark changed our lives.

And yet, the day stayed with me.

Maybe because the best photo walks are not always about spectacle. They are about attention. They are about the willingness to stop in front of a plain building, an empty hallway, an old window, or a man sitting outside his store, and recognize that something human, textured, and quietly beautiful is already there.

Ordinary places are worth noticing.

Sometimes they are the only places honest enough to show us what we are really looking for.