Lone Pine was once a regular stop for the Southern Pacific Railroad. It is no longer. Its yellow depot sits well out of town, alone and forgotten. It is in private hands now – a family is slowly restoring it. The owner graciously allowed us to photograph here. (You can meet the owner by clicking the first of the two thumbnails below. ) When I shoot a ruin, I rarely, if ever, “show the whole thing.” I usually try to find eloquent details that best tell its story. To me, those key details were the nails that have worked their way out of the old train platform, and the weary bench used by passengers waiting for the train. I include a bit of scenery to give the depot a sense of place – the Sierra Nevada mountains. The Lone Pine depot also witnessed one of the most heart breaking chapters in American history. It was through this station that thousands of Japanese-Americans passed on their way to internment at the nearby Manzanar War Relocation Center during World War II. Click on the second of the two thumbnails below to see an image made at that center.

The fence marks the site of Keeler’s beach on Lake Owens. The lake is no longer there – it has been piped from Keeler to the city of Los Angeles. An old trailer that once served as a beachfront home is all that is left of the “beach.” I include the coil of barbed wire resting on the fence as a symbol of what has happened here. A place that once welcomed visitors now rejects them. The smashed trailer, its aluminum sides gleaming in the setting sun, offers still another metaphor for Keeler’s fate. Home sweet home is no longer the case.

A combine is a machine used to harvest, thresh, and clean grain plants. This is a ghost combine. It is stands near the road, overgrown with plants and weeds, a memory more than a machine. It seemed as if I was photographing a dinosaur, its long neck leaning crazily forward, as if it was lunging at me. The early morning light has given it a golden hue that guilds its deception. It stands adrift, an extinct creature awash in an ironic sea of vividly colored plants.

As with the car in the previous image, this truck has also been left in Benton’s bushes to rot away. Yet the lovely flowering sage growing around it ironically seems to offer a fragrant and beautiful salute. I take a vantage point that stresses the flowers and abstracts the truck behind it. A long mirror extends diagonally from the truck, as if to better see the flowers. But the mirror is black and the cab empty.

To capture the essence of a ruined town, I look for ways to abstract, imply, and symbolize, rather than merely describe its appearance. The 19th century window glass in many of Bodie’s windows offers a perfect reflective surface for my purpose here. The old house reflected in the widow is split and dismembered. It almost seems to be moving between the panes in the window. Much of Bodie’s charm rests in the domain of the human imagination. And so does my expressive purpose here. My viewers can take this picture of a reflection and make of it whatever they wish.

This house is, by all standards, a ruin. Yet the table is ready for dinner, and an incongruous portrait of George Washington looks upon the scene without visible concern. This image asks us to consider the nature of a ruin – at what point does a house become unlivable? The greens and golds in this photo are hauntingly beautiful, even if the walls seem to be on the verge of crumbling. I made this image through a window, and the digital image is far brighter and much more vividly colored than the scene I saw with my own eyes.