photo sharing and upload picture albums photo forums search pictures popular photos photography help login
Type your message and click Add Comment
It is best to login or register first but you may post as a guest.
Enter an optional name and contact email address. Name
Name Email
help private comment
Phil Douglis | all galleries >> Galleries >> Gallery Forty One: Ruins and wrecks: photographing the rusted, busted past > The face in the window, Bodie Historical Park, California, 2006
previous | next
21-OCT-2006

The face in the window, Bodie Historical Park, California, 2006

I was first drawn to this scene because of the ghostly effect the wavy window glass gave to the old buildings in the distance, and the symbolism of the empty frame on the wall next to it. As I was framing the shot, a shadowy face of an Asian woman suddenly appeared in that stained and ghostly window. I made this image just before she disappeared. I recognized her as a fellow photographer – a woman unknowingly standing in for one of those restless spirits that some say still inhabit this ghost town. History tells us that several hundred Asian people actually worked in the Bodie mines in the 1880s, and this house was in the very area where they lived. For me, it was a happy accident. Her ghostly face adds much meaning to this image, no matter how we may choose to interpret it.

Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ50
1/400s f/5.6 at 32.9mm iso100 full exif

other sizes: small medium large original auto
share
Phil Douglis11-May-2007 04:01
Sometimes photography frustrates us. We try so hard to make things work, and when they don't we can only learn from it and move on to the next picture. But photography also gives us gifts when we least expect it, such as what is happening here, Suwanee. We must be ready to take advantage of the moment -- as you call it, the decisive moment.
Guest 11-May-2007 01:27
Amazing Phil, the timing, the subject, the photographer being there, the story you captured here is just no less than a decisive moment!
Phil Douglis24-Jan-2007 05:25
You are right, Iris, to ask who is looking at who here? What do we make of her, and what does she make of us? We are confront our past, and our past looks us squarely in the eye. Thanks for the thought.
Iris Maybloom (irislm)24-Jan-2007 00:59
Oops..In the first sentence below, I mean "and the viewer" not or....
Iris Maybloom (irislm)24-Jan-2007 00:57
I see in this image an interesting historical duality between the mysterious figure looking in or the viewer looking out. Each will view the scene from their respective vantage point and these different experiences will shape their perspective and, therefore, their interpretation of the scene. Isn't this what makes history so very interesting?
Phil Douglis14-Nov-2006 01:29
It is creepy because of the wavy glass and shadowy figure, Theodore. The darkness around the window adds to it as well.
Guest 13-Nov-2006 13:21
I had a fright when i saw this picture. So creepy!
Phil Douglis06-Nov-2006 19:05
You have caught the essence of this image, Ai Li. I looked at this image a moment after I took it and wondered the same thing myself. My camera told me she was there, yet she looks for all the world as if she is a fleeting, furtive visitor from the past.
AL06-Nov-2006 10:33
Is she a dream or a reality? Caught in the past and the present, that's what we all are now. We're looking at her as she's looking at us too.
Phil Douglis30-Oct-2006 05:48
That's why I made the image, Carol -- the wavy background is the key symbol here. It can represent a dream state, the long ago past, a mirage, I saw her as part of that mirage. She is there but not there -- her look is so tenative, her face phantom-like in those shadows.
Carol E Sandgren30-Oct-2006 04:45

The wavy image in back of the face leads me to believe that that is the dream, and she is emerging from it into reality.
Phil Douglis29-Oct-2006 06:07
Yes, she seems to have lost her way -- her positioning within the window is cautious, almost furtive. You have grasped the essence of this image and explained it well. Thanks, Ceci.
Guest 29-Oct-2006 05:27
I love how the rippled glass distorts the sunbaked distance, and how this human seems to be trying to find her reflection in what may be the frame of a little mirror hanging on the inside wall. It has a "who am I?" quality, a sense of someone lost, trying to find her way. Magical, ghostly, almost creepy, and utterly enchanting.
Phil Douglis27-Oct-2006 19:23
Thanks, YOP -- it was a decisive moment. An instant earlier or later and the ghostly light on half of her face would not be there. A few moments later and she would be gone. I never could have posed her in this way, either. I don't beleive in photographic luck -- I think photographers must make their own luck by anticipating what might happen and be ready and able to respond in kind. However this image was, as I said, a happy accident. It just happened.
YOP27-Oct-2006 13:57
A dicisive moment captured!
Type your message and click Add Comment
It is best to login or register first but you may post as a guest.
Enter an optional name and contact email address. Name
Name Email
help private comment