A quaint long-distance calling poster from the 1930s still hangs on the wall over the telephone directories in the lobby of the old Strater Hotel in Durango. Now that cell phone packages have replaced conventional long distance toll calls, the poster promoting the use of a phone as faster and cheaper than writing appears nostalgically humorous in this era of instant and constant connectivity. Just across the way stand several phone booths, originally designed for the convenience of the hotel’s visitors. Today, most of the phones that were once in them have been removed.

It came at us out of the clouds, a steel clad ghost bristling with guns. It was the Liberty Belle, a restored World War II B-17 Flying Fortress. I made this image through the windshield of a moving car, getting off only two shots before it vanished again. This was one of them, photographic proof that I was not imagining things. It had taken off from Lawrence Municipal Airport in North Andover, and I caught it in the skies over Ipswich. My fast shutter speed of 1/2000th of second has eerily stopped all four propellers, yet the plane still flies – adding a ghostly dimension. I later converted the image to black and white to give it a period look.

Photographing museum exhibits usually produces little more than descriptive visual information. But not this time. The battleship USS Arizona was sent to the bottom of Pearl Harbor by Japanese torpedo bombers on December 7th, 1941, taking nearly 1,200 American sailors with it, and bringing the United States into World War II. An exhibit “Flagship of the Fleet: Life and Death of the USS Arizona” is a fixture at the Arizona State Capitol Museum. While a rusted fragment of the ship’s hull is the focal point of the exhibit ( see http://www.pbase.com/pnd1/image/111595488 ), a tattered, yellowing life preserver from the ship runs a close second. The preserver is mounted in glass case, which is backed with a vintage photograph showing a sailor aboard the ship. What drew me to it was an eerie reflection – the left hand side of the glass case was reflecting a ghostly version of the sailor back into the display. The more we look at it, the more likely we are to travel back into this sad and terrible story. While the sailor is grim, his reflection seems to grieve. The yellowed life preserver provides context for both.

This room choed to the arguments of politicians, starting in 1901. It was the scene of the creation of the Arizona State constitution in 1912. The lawmakers have departed, moving to new quarters in a nearby building. But the debates can still linger in this chamber, if you have a good imagination and listen closely enough. I climbed to the visitor’s gallery overlooking the chamber in order to anchor the image with the delicate lighting fixture that first blazed at the turn of the last century. I use a diagonal composition to draw the eye from these lights to the legislator’s darkened empty desks and chairs below. By spot metering on the lights, the room itself goes into shadow, giving the desks and chairs a ghostly presence, and taking us back into time itself.

The symbolic line between past and present in this image stands at the spot where the light gives way to the shadows. I place the lower edge of the frame on the lower edge of the first step leading up to the doorway of this elegantly restored 19th century brownstone home on a Manhattan’s East Side. With such placement, I invite the viewer to step into the frame, and climb with me towards the gilded lights that still burn, even though the night has now passed into day. The building itself is wrapped in abstracting shadows, yet we can make out the reflections of the brilliantly illuminated foliage in its elegantly arched window glass. Vines flow from two balconies, and the glow of reflected light softly warms the stone façade. I wanted this image to take us back to another time, and thanks to the contrast between light and shadow, it does.

The shades are still drawn against the brutality of the Arizona sun. The old office, cooled by those shades and a single fan, housed Arizona’s governors for more than 60 years. I made sure to expose this image so that the softly glowing figure at the desk becomes shadowy and thus more alive, obscuring the fact that we are actually looking at a mannequin. The figure represents George Wylie Paul Hunt, the first governor of Arizona, and the man largely responsible for its constitution. Hunt served as governor from 1912 to 1919, again from 1923 to 1929, and still again from 1931 to 1933. Through light, shadow, and color, I’ve tried to roll back time here in my own way.