17-SEP-2008
Down on its luck, Antelope, Oregon, 2008
A row of lucky horseshoes, now rusted and forgotten, hangs on the façade of this abandoned building, one of several dilapidated structures in the ghost town of Antelope, Oregon. I use a 28mm wideangle lens to move in for detail, yet still retain the dead grasses that carpet the foreground and lead us to those boarded up windows. Nature has taken its toll over the years, and the signage tries to keep vandals at bay. But I kept coming back to the horseshoes, wondering who put them there and why. Whatever luck they may have brought to this place and its occupants, has evidently run its course.
13-SEP-2008
Barn door, Pondosa, California, 2008
We shot in and around a half-demolished barn for a half hour, and this image was the first of many. It turned out to be the most expressive of all. The barn door is falling off its hinges, missing a board at the bottom, and leaning precariously. It seems about to be consumed by the pine tree that embraces it. The dappled morning sun softly illuminates the weathered boards, and the double X pattern is symbolically appropriate. The barn itself is about to be “X’d out.”
20-MAY-2008
Phantom in the window, Chinese Camp, California, 2008
This house has been abandoned for a lot time. Huge weeds grow as high as its windows while a broken screen catches the light and forms it into a spectral figure. I moved close to the screen, layered the image with the arching strands of weeds, and allowed the phantom in the window to speak for itself.
11-NOV-2007
Barn door, Nageezi, New Mexico, 2007
I photographed this old barn door near Nageezi, New Mexico, on the road to Chaco Canyon. It reveals its own history as it sheds its skin and displays its inner workings. I base the image on its geometric structure – the repeating diagonals play against vertical and horizontal thrusts. I under-exposed the image to deepen the rich maroon coloration. It may be falling apart in front of us, yet its underlying strength is there for all to see.
10-NOV-2007
Cliff Palace, Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado, 2007
The Cliff Palace is the largest cliff dwelling in North America. Built into an alcove, high on a sandstone cliff, the 300 foot long ruin holds 150 rooms and was home to about 100 people. It was built by Ancestral Puebloans, also known as the Anasazi, in the 13th century, about the same time as the Great Crusades were going on in medieval Europe. By the beginning of the 14th century, it had been abandoned. Protected from the weather, the Cliff Palace and its treasures remained virtually intact for 600 years, until its discovery by cowboys in 1888. Curio seekers ransacked its ruins until it was protected by the creation of Mesa Verde National Park in 1906. We viewed it from a nearby cliff at sunset, and I made this image just as the evening shadows enveloped its round kivas and lapped at the base of its towers. While many photographers would prefer images made in the full glow of sunset, I wanted to evoke the passage of time over the long life of this remarkable ruin, and the abstracting shadows of this autumn evening expressed it well for me.
06-AUG-2007
Tractor, Gold King Mine, Haynes, Arizona, 2007
Haynes is strewn with rusting mining equipment, including an ancient Caterpillar tractor. Instead of describing the entire tractor, I stress its ruination by moving in to define its rust and decay. What once rumbled and roared as it scoured the earth to reveal its riches, now corrodes in silence. I wanted this image to evoke the spirit of this mine and the ghost town that now surrounds its ruins.
06-AUG-2007
Bordello, Gold King Mine, Haynes, Arizona, 2007
Black and white can add a powerful sense of poignancy to an image, particularly images out of the past. In color, this image does a beautiful job of vividly describing the ruins of a bordello that once served the miners who worked this mine in the early 20th century. Built high on a hill, it can only be viewed at a distance, and the painted mannequin in a white dress dominated the original color version of this image. When I zoomed in on the mannequin, important details show up for the first time, such as its incongruously missing hand and mournful expression. But the painted face of the mannequin looked very artificial in color. I changed it to a sepia image, but the graphic effect looked contrived. When I converted it to black and white, the color details on the painted face vanished, the porch looked older, and the mannequin became more of a ghost, and less of a whore. In black and white, the vandalized mannequin personifies the death of the Old West.
10-JUN-2007
Powder Magazine, Mare Island Naval Shipyard, San Francisco, California, 2007
The past is a mysterious place, nowhere so than at Mare Island, a deserted US Naval base that has been shut down since 1996. At its center stands a series of concrete blockhouses, built many years ago to store explosives. They stand like tombs, plants growing out of their tops. This image intends to express a sense of the past – the interplay of light and shadow on the mossy green concrete takes us as far back as we wish to go. The huge trees with peeling trunks offer not only these shadows – their rough textures are a perfect complement to the mossy powder magazines they guard.
22-FEB-2007
High and dry, Rhyolite, Nevada, 2007
The ghost town of Rhyolite is just outside of Death Valley National Park. We found this rusting sign on the desert floor there -- an appropriate symbol for a place that gets less than two inches of rain a year. When visiting abandoned places, always look beyond the ruins themselves. Search for discarded things of symbolic value that may be help you tell your story. This sign certainly did. I moved my camera down low to partially obscure the sign with a bare desert plant. There is not much nourishment here for vegetation, either.
21-FEB-2007
Eureka gold mine, Death Valley National Park, California, 2007
The last great American gold rush occurred in Death Valley in the early 20th Century. The Eureka Mine was built in 1909. Today, the tunnel into the mine is a place of broken tracks and ghostly dreams. The tunnel is not open to visitors. It was fenced off, requiring me to make this photograph through one of the openings of the chain link fence. This scene could not be seen with the eye – the entrance to the mine was too dark. Yet the sensor of a digital camera can show us things that the eye cannot. It took a one second exposure to get this much detail to appear. By pushing my lens shade up against the chain link fence, I was able to hold the camera steady enough to make this photo. The rock-strewn track enters the mine and then vanishes into blackness. The last things we see are the railroad ties, broken and skewed, just like the hopes of those who invested their money and dreams in the lonely place.
22-FEB-2007
Discarded, Rhyolite, Nevada, 2007
The largest ghost town in Death Valley, Rhyolite is littered with rusted household items and ruined buildings. The twin frames of this rusting bedspring echo the twin walls of a ruined bank that stands bleakly in the distance. The bedspring dips to the right, just as the ruins do. By juxtaposing the bedspring with the ruins of the bank, I am able to create a symbolic relationship that tells a more complete story than by showing only the distant ruins.
23-FEB-2007
Post office, Darwin, California, 2007
Not much mail is moving through Darwin any more. A virtual ghost town just outside of Death Valley, Darwin has endured the collapse of its mining enterprises, at least three major fires, and the coming of a state highway that choked off its tourist trade. A post office is a symbol of communication, while a boarded-up post office symbolizes a breakdown in human contact. It can also symbolize the realities of the eventual decline and demise of our postal system as we knew it. The faded sign on the old marquee also suggests that someone tried to use the building for another purpose, but that enterprise failed as well.