A Friend Waiting for Neal Cassady – San Miguel de Allende Photography – Limited Edition Fine Art Print – Mexico Railroad – TRI-X Film
I started walking south along the tracks — past a loading dock, a water-treatment plant, a squatter's farm built from scrap wood and tin. A small garden, a chicken coop, clothes drying on a line, a horse shifting in a makeshift stall. In no time, the city fell away and the country began. Burros grazed in the orchards to the west; a jagged hillside of mesquite and prickly pear rose to the southeast. The air was cool, thin, mountain still.
Neal Cassady once walked these same tracks on a February night in 1968. The story goes that he wandered into a village wedding, was welcomed with food and mezcal, and later drifted off alone into the dark. By morning he was found unconscious by the rails, taken to the hospital, and gone by the end of the day — four days before his 42nd birthday.
Shot on Kodak TRI-X 400 film, this photograph looks down the same line Cassady followed — quiet now, except for a stray dog waiting in the frame, like an echo of what never returned.
Artist's Reflection: A Friend Waiting for Neal Cassady grew from a sense of quiet presence — the feeling that stories don't truly vanish, they just wait for us to listen. As I walked those same tracks outside San Miguel de Allende, the stillness felt inhabited, like memory pressing softly against the air. The photograph isn't meant as a portrait of a moment past, but as an echo — an image that carries the weight of wandering, of friendship, of the mythic and the ordinary meeting in one forgotten corner of time.
Edition: Each limited edition print is hand-signed and numbered by the artist. A Certificate of Authenticity accompanies every print. Once the edition sells out it is permanently retired. This edition is strictly limited to 25 prints.
Medium: Straight film photography — Kodak TRI-X 400. San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, 2020.
Size :Available in four sizes. Select your size from the dropdown menu above.
Paper: Studio sizes 13×9" and 19×13" are printed on Agave paper — a natural fiber fine art paper made from the same plant that grows along the tracks where this photograph was taken.
Larger sizes are printed on Hahnemühle Fine Art Baryta 325 — chosen for its ability to render the full tonal depth of this TRI-X negative, the closest inkjet equivalent to a traditional darkroom fiber print.
About the Artist
Harry Johansing is a California-based photographer with a life spent with a camera — self-taught, experimental, working across film and digital. In 1992 he founded Costa Rica Natural Paper Co., and paper has been central to his practice ever since — not as a surface but as a material with its own presence in the work. His photography has taken him across California, Mexico, Central America, and sub-Saharan Africa. His prints are held in private collections internationally.
Explore the full body of work: harryjohansing.com
Framing: Prints are sold unframed. Frames shown in product images are for display only. Many collectors choose to frame locally to match their space.
All photographs and prints are copyrighted © Harry Johansing. Purchase does not transfer copyright or reproduction rights.