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Phil Douglis | all galleries >> Galleries >> Gallery Forty One: Ruins and wrecks: photographing the rusted, busted past > Powder Magazine, Mare Island Naval Shipyard, San Francisco, California, 2007
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10-JUN-2007

Powder Magazine, Mare Island Naval Shipyard, San Francisco, California, 2007

The past is a mysterious place, nowhere so than at Mare Island, a deserted US Naval base that has been shut down since 1996. At its center stands a series of concrete blockhouses, built many years ago to store explosives. They stand like tombs, plants growing out of their tops. This image intends to express a sense of the past – the interplay of light and shadow on the mossy green concrete takes us as far back as we wish to go. The huge trees with peeling trunks offer not only these shadows – their rough textures are a perfect complement to the mossy powder magazines they guard.

Leica V-Lux 1
1/500s f/6.3 at 8.0mm iso100 full exif

other sizes: small medium large original auto
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Phil Douglis20-Jun-2007 18:16
Thank you, Ceci, for seeing this ravaged tree trunk as a metaphor for war. As I noted in my caption, the rough textures of the trunk are a perfect complement to the powder magazines it guards.
Guest 20-Jun-2007 17:14
Strangely enough, this tree, a living ancient thing, seems to suggest the carnage that results from the "tossing around" of bombs and their damage to human beings, with its shredded bark, huge convolutions, exploded parts, crevasses, limbs fallen on the ground, and general disarray. The fact that the tree is leaning away from the magazine, standing like much of man's buildings as massive, linear forms, adds to this feeling. It's a perfect metaphor for the carnage that results when explosives are used in war. It's almost as though a body had been blown apart and tossed helter skelter onto the trunk of the tree...
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