I was standing in the darkness of a primitive room once occupied by a Chilean nitrate miner, a place abandoned to the dust-laden winds of the Atacama Desert for more than 40 years. Its wooden walls are covered with graffiti, and there is not much left that speaks of either the man or the miner. What photographic approach might work here? I solved the problem by using abstraction to make an image that asks questions of the viewer, instead of providing answers. Using my spot meter, I expose for the brilliantly illuminated dirt floor at the base of the old wooden door. Everything in the shadows becomes dark, the graffiti disappears, and the image is reduced to a series of geometric shapes. Light seeps through the slats of the wooden wall, and a warming sun drenches the doorway and the worn paint on the old wooden door. These elements create a relationship in light and space that asks us to wonder about those who once lived within this small space. The image leaves much to our imaginations, one of the purposes of photographic abstraction.