I have never been to Cookietown, although I hoped to go. I heard about it in 2015 because my friend searched “cookie” in the weather app. There wasn’t—still isn’t—much about it online, mostly a Wikipedia stub and this old newspaper snippet. At that time I lived in Austin, a reasonable 300 miles to the south, so I thought I would go see Cookietown for myself. Maybe I’d make some pictures. It could become a “project.” That would have been a reasonable course of action, for a photographer.
A half dozen false starts and a pandemic later, I’m now clear on the other side of the country. I just Google Street Viewed Cookietown. It was underwhelming. There’s nothing there except a church and an intersection. Possibly cows. That’s fine. No matter where one decides to look, everything is made of the same stuff. And it’s all surprising.
Then there are all these pictures, which I took since I first learned of Cookietown. They’re from everywhere; a garbage dump in Philadelphia, suburban Houston, inside a borrowed Brooklyn apartment. There is bread! Lately I’ve had a hunch that all the bits put together might form a Cookietown—one haunting place more wild than itself.