COSSACKS MC at the 2500 Club, Belknap St., Fort Worth, TX, 1998

Photographer Peter Feresten arrived in Fort Worth in 1975. He staked his claim to the city at once, setting out to make lasting images of the Fort Worth that still was located deep inside Texas.

Feresten has been bearing witness with his still cameras as Cowtown’s intimate spaces of human habitation and communion melt into air and its urban villagers scatter yonder as if slow-motion explosions were blowing their communities apart.

He has taken black-and-white photographs using wooden view cameras loaded with 8-by-10-inch negatives that make pictures so sharp they make your back teeth ache. Now he shoots color pictures with cheap plastic cameras that look like party favors and deliver images that might have come from the brain of a woozy party guest.

Feresten’s first photographs of Fort Worth captured the last days of the Stockyards and the cowboy culture around it, when the bars on Exchange Avenue were filled with customers whose boots were a part of their workday gear and who danced to western swing music because they had grown up with it.

Nowadays Feresten is a fellow traveler with -- and the recording angel of -- a roaring band of brothers known as the Cossacks Motor Cycle Club, Fort Worth Chapter. To please the Cossacks, he decorated his camera with a tiny plastic skull smoking a cigarette.

On September 16, 2007, Peter Feresten passed away. He will be greatly missed in the North Texas photographic community.