Today’s Goldfield is a recreation of the actual gold mining town that stood near the beginning of the Apache Trail, in Arizona’s Superstition Mountains. The original town thrived from 1893 to 1898, and when the gold ran out, the desert took over. It rose again in 1921, when new mining methods brought forth additional gold. Eventually the ore finally ran out in 1926, and the town was left to decay for another 60 years. About twenty-five years ago, a commercial recreation was built as a tourist attraction on the ruins of the vanished town. Today, it is filled with individual shops, occupying authentic copies of the old buildings. We arrived an hour before sunset, just as the shops were closing. We virtually had the town to ourselves -- an old Western stage set bathed in warm evening light.

I’ve used layering to gradually build a sense of place in this image. I include alternating layers of light and shadow on the dirt road that lead us through the picture, and towards the town church at the rear. I silhouette a spiral staircase and a “bird cage” jail on the left, a layer that leans in the direction of the church. I include a saguaro on the right edge as a framing device, leading the eye towards the middle layer – an old barn, glowing in the setting sun. A pbase photo colleague from Malaysia, Celia Lim, was also working the scene, and I waited for her to move past the barn and walk below the huge tree that adds bulk to the middle layer. Celia becomes a layer unto herself, a silhouette urging us to follow her towards the final layer – the church itself.