If you believe in ghosts, there is no better place in Santa Fe to find them than at the historic La Fonda Hotel. Although the present structure dates from 1922, there has been a series of inns and hotels on this site since Santa Fe’s founding in 1607. Executions, murders, and suicides are said to have taken place here over the years, and travelers periodically report ghost sightings in the present hotel. Given its haunted history, I felt obligated to create an image commemorating that aspect of La Fonda’s legend. Although it might have been a lot easier to fabricate a ghostly photo with Photoshop manipulations, I preferred to find my own moment in light and shadow, an actual image expressing a haunted vision. Standing across the street from one corner of the hotel, and using a long lens to draw a crosswalk into the frame as a lead-in to my images, I previsualized the images I would make before I made them – I simply wanted to photograph a series of early morning shadows cast by passing pedestrians on the hotel’s façade. And so I waited and shot, and shot and waited. People often cluttered the crosswalk, and passing cars obliterated some of my favorite shadows. After a half hour of shooting, this image was as close as I would come to imprinting the spirits of the past upon the present structure. The people themselves are well out of the frame, but the low angle of the sun here has etched a vanishing body into the recessed portal – all we can see are his legs and part of his body. Another person, walking just in front of him, and wearing a wide brimmed cowboy hat, is dramatically defined on the wall just to the right of the portal. Their abstracted images have been frozen in time here forever, and in their own one-dimensional way, each has become a Ghost of the La Fonda.