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Phil Douglis | all galleries >> Galleries >> Gallery Fourteen: Expressing the meaning of buildings and structures > School, Ghost Town, Grafton, Utah, 2006
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07-FEB-2006

School, Ghost Town, Grafton, Utah, 2006

Grafton, Utah, lies along the Virgin River just outside of Zion National Park. In 1886, its Mormon settlers built this adobe building to use as a school and church. In the early years of the 20th Century, its families moved to land with better irrigation, leaving this old school and a graveyard behind. This image offers more than a description of the building itself. It goes further, providing a ghostly context for the building. It stands alone in a desert, under wisps of clouds. I used a 24mm wideangle lens to stretch the scene, and stress the height of the clouds as well as the sweep of the landscape, while keeping the size of the building as large as possible within the frame. (If I had used a narrower focal length, I could have included the same content by backing up, but then the building would have become smaller and lost its emphasis.) The key to the expressiveness of this image is the placement of the diagonal cloud over the chimney of the building. It appears as smoke, yet the building has been vacant for more than 100 years.

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Phil Douglis08-Sep-2008 17:23
Thanks, Cyndy -- this image is another example of seeing potential relationships, and then moving both vantage point and frame to make them come to life.
Guest 08-Sep-2008 16:41
The (cloud) smoke coming out of the chimney was indeed the first thing my eye noticed, followed by the incongruity between an abandoned building and the implied expression of the life once lived there. I couldn't wait to read your comment to see if this was what you'd intended, which of course it was.
Phil Douglis17-Apr-2006 07:14
Thanks for bringing up the importance of context to this image, Ruthie. This, like all of my images, is intended as a teaching image, not as a stand alone work of photographic art. Even if this image was not a teaching image, but perhaps used in an article or book on Utah -- written context about ghost towns would come along with it there as well. But you are right -- if this image was framed by itself on a wall, it could be anywhere. Without verbal context, it would read as a bleak, lonely place, but not necessarily part of an abandoned town.
ruthemily03-Apr-2006 01:02
again you bring opposites into your image. while on first glance you may not think of this as a particular incongruous scene, when given the context they begin to emerge. life versus death - in implied activity (smoke) versus actual desertion. things have ground to a halt for the town and i get an eerie feeling even only as a viewer of such an abandoned, seemingly lonely and isolated place, but the forces and movements of nature still continue all around.

you call this gallery 'Expressing the meaning of buildings and structures': without meaning to question your intention of what i'm sure is a very insightful gallery, i'm wondering how, without any context, this image can express that this building is indeed part of a ghost town? perhaps that is my own ignorance about such places, or perhaps it's one of those times when you would make sure you provided context...but perhaps not, and that's what i was wondering.
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