Jefferson Co Ga Louisville Store Front 12/26/18 Photo by Roy Burke

The best back-road trips with Doctor Flowers aka Roy Burke usually included forays into small towns, which if they rated, featured some weathered windows and doors for Doc to suss out and capture on his trusty camera(in later years a digital Nikon). The entrepreneurial dreams and aesthetic choices he loved to capture were those of the independent hangers-on in the near-abandoned blocks nearby the square. The actual commerce in many these places had long before decamped to the bypass or the interstate, plopped down in a late 20th century shopping mall tied to the Wal Mart, or the food gas bathroom node at the interstate crossings of Generic America. Left behind are often the ruins of the glory days when everyone ‘came to town’ to trade, to gossip, or in the case of this would-be club, sip a Bud Light. He took this photo on one of our last Christmas week runs together, in 2013. Our ultimate goal was to see and feel the mysterious Ohoopee Dunes, which we saw and documented the next day outside of Swainsboro. But towards end our first day out we found ourselves in Downtown Louisville, Georgia, with the perfect winter afternoon light to hunt some windows and doors. The uneven-ness of it all, the land and carpentry and paint job, the Rothko-like color and line juxtaposition, the light fixture from another century standing guard, the ghostly Bud Light light, with the battered OPEN sign putting the lie to it all–it’s a quintessential Roy Burke photo.