Iron Wheel, Bodie, California, 2004 by Phil Douglis

Phil Douglis | all galleries >> Galleries >> Gallery Nineteen: Conveying a Sense of Place – A Town of Ghosts, Frozen in Time > Iron Wheel, Bodie, California, 2004

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17-OCT-2004

Iron Wheel, Bodie, California, 2004

Mining tools and equipment still litter Bodie. Nothing has been picked up. Stuff sits just where it was left. This wagon has not moved in over 60 years. And that is why I photographed it in this manner. The grass has been cut, allowing visitors to easily move around Bodie, yet it has been left to grow over the rim of this wheel. I move in that rim and symbolically stress that point: the land under Bodie continues to live and grow, but the town itself remains dead and silent.

Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ20
1/800s f/4.0 at 50.6mm iso80 full exif

other sizes: small medium large original auto

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Phil Douglis		29-Apr-2008 06:32
Thank you, kat, for those words. Detail can establish a mood -- look at the golden strands of dead grass that contrast to the black rim of the dead wheel.

Guest		29-Apr-2008 03:37
Definately a moment frozen in time. You have a beautiful eye for picking up detail and the mood of your photographs. Nice work. Vote :)

Phil Douglis		23-Apr-2007 02:50
Thanks, Don -- "holding the feel" comes from the texture here. It is the angle of the back lighting that makes it so tactile.

Donald Verger		22-Apr-2007 20:42
lovely image and careful exposure! vote! it holds the feel

Phil Douglis		27-Feb-2005 05:38
Zandra, I am charmed by your musings, as always. Rust and dust as symbols of time past. But what of time now? Can we stop it in it tracks. Can, as you ask, we freeze the present? I am not Albert Einstein, but I'd like to think so. In my gallery on time, I show many examples of time frozen, time extended, time felt, time made incongruous, time revealed, time implied. Of the three things photographers have to work with -- choices in time, light, and space -- time is the most precarious. We don't have the luxury to plan or control time. Time controls us. We can freeze or blur action, reaction, and interaction. We can let it flow or stop it ways that our own eyes have never seen for themselves. Of course, everyone knows that the camera really does not stop time from passing. But at very least it is able to overcome the limitations of human memory, which is enough to make it one of the most valuable tools man has invented. The person you may have photographed earlier today no longer exists in the moment you captured. But the photograph of him or her in that moment exists. And that is good enough for me.

Guest		21-Feb-2005 17:54
It must be something with me and wheel...here i am again...at a wheel. I chose to go back to this gallery as i fing the concept of freezing time very appealing. The question that rizes to me when i watch this is...is it always the past that we want to freeze, as this shot indicates? Do we ever want to freeze the present and how would we go about to do that? In a way i find that to me more of a challenge as the present cant be frozen in time untill it has passed. Or can it? In a way, the shot with the tires, that i commented yesterday, were more powerfull in it's statement to me as i hade more freedom to iamgaine my own world surounding it...cause of the abstraction...and you know i have a vivid imagination. This shot, absolutly beautifull, speeks volumes but the suroundings are made much more clear as we see the grass. We can even guess what time of year it is...fall, when the grass is no longer green. I am not saying that this is not just as good of a shot then the other, but it is diffrent. One things that, atleast for me, speeks of the success in both these photos are them iamges i get on my mind when i look at them. Seeing this i picture a young farmer boy and a girl walking on the medow near the fields. I can see life as it may have appeared then. When looking at the other picture i see the same man and woman only now they are on a small road having a pickning in the grass beside the car...maybe they got a flat tire and were lucky to be able to tunr that in to a joyfull event instead. So what exactly is it that makes them work. Here it is clearly the runst on the wheel and on the other it is the dust. Both items that tells us that some time has passed and that these items has been untouched during this time. They wer put there, by somone, for some reason and then, time stopped. Only the forces of nature graced them with it's precense...then Phil came along and gave them new life and value :-)

Phil Douglis		29-Oct-2004 04:04
The grass does give plenty of context to the wheel, doesn't it? Or perhaps it is the wheel that gives context to the grass. Depends on how you look at it, Bruce.

Guest		29-Oct-2004 02:56
A tight shot, abstract, yet with a full sense of context.

Phil Douglis		28-Oct-2004 03:00
Very perceptive comments, Rod -- when I shoot color i always try to make aspects of color part of my message. Otherwise, black and white would be more effective.

Guest		28-Oct-2004 02:47
This is an excellent example of "less is more." I'm a big fan of black and white, as you know, but here the color of the dead grass(?) and the old color and textures of the rusted wheel brings the feel of abandonment home

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