To an unknowing observer, Archer City might seem unremarkable. A small Texan town home to fewer than 2,000 residents, a handful of bars, shops, a park, and a miniature golf course. Yet, this modest locale was the setting for one of the greatest American films of all time.
"The Last Picture Show", Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971, black-and-white adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s novel of the same name, explores the cultural and economic decline of a mid-century town through the lens of its disillusioned youth.
Though filmed in Archer City, Bogdanovich renamed the town in the movie "Anarene", a real place—or at least it was - located just eight miles north of Archer City. The small settlement, established in 1908, was all but abandoned by the mid-20th century, dealt its final blow when the railway stopped passing through.
Using this thematically and spiritually as a foundation, Spanish photographer Mikel Bastida spent nearly a decade capturing places "that cinema has left behind." Towns, streets, and structures once immortalised on the silver screen, now frozen in time, encapsulating an America lingering on the fringes of its urbanized, cosmopolitan cores.
Through medium-format photography, Bastida captures these spaces with raw yet poetic sensitivity. His high-quality prints are as much about the people who inhabit these places as they are about the physical locations themselves. The images depict individuals and forgotten objects whose stories endure in the margins—trapped in a liminal space between myth and reality.
Though he avoids obvious narratives, Bastida quietly confronts the unfulfilled promises of these cinematic legacies. Many of these settings have been left physically and economically stranded, their communities shaped—and at times eroded—by the very stories Hollywood once romanticised. Bastida’s work exposes the duality of film’s influence: how it may immortalise these places, yet often fails to uplift them, leaving them in the shadows of their brief cinematic fame.
In the book’s concluding essay, Eduardo Momeñe reflects: “Perhaps everything in American cinema and photography is poetry, where all that’s real about the world is merely raw material for building the fiction—that imposture—which expresses the experience for which words—those of the prosaic world—do not serve.”
This sentiment echoes throughout Bastida’s photographs, elevating these spaces and their inhabitants beyond the shadows of the cinematic myths they once served.
Anarene is more than a photographic journey; it’s a contemplative homage to an America caught in the interplay between its idealised image and tangible reality. Like Bogdanovich’s film, Bastida’s work carries a melancholic beauty that lingers, reminding us of the power—and cost—of the stories we tell.
Anarene is co-published by Editorial RM & Comunidad de Madrid and is available here.
