As a stage setting opening image, this photograph expresses the mood of the place. We move from the dark foreground to a grouping of four modest homes in various stages of disintegration. The trees animate the scene, while the sparsely wooded hills in the background offer a sense of location.

I made over a thousand images during my two days of shooting at Bannack. In editing them for this photo-essay, it was important to keep in mind that each image I selected must be distinctively different from the others. For example, I had made at least a couple of hundred shots of just the abandoned rooms within the various structures. All of them evoked the past, yet I chose only three of them for this essay. This one, made with a 20mm wideangle focal length, evokes the past most expressively because of the old sink left standing alone among the empty rooms of this house. I liked the way the light plays along the floorboards, the bluish color of the window light echoing the blue sink itself.

Rather than show the old desks that are still in place in this room, I concentrate on the glowing window shade with its carefully tied drawstring. The drawn shade symbolizes closure – the school is no more, but the light of the knowledge once gained within that room still lingers.

While shooting inside of the church, I noticed that a light snow had just begun to fall. Although we were there in late May, the weather ignores the calendar in this remote part of Montana. I framed the trees and buildings, huddled in the gloomy light opposite the church, through its open door. The repeating diagonals within the trees echo the diagonal thrust of the church banister.

We returned early the following morning to continue shooting at Bannack. May 23rd had brought Bannack back into the depths of winter. The difference the fallen snow makes here is profound. I wanted to make this as cold and l lonely an image as I could produce. There are no people on the deserted main street of the town. Tire tracks enter the frame, and then hauntingly stop. The school and its adjoining buildings are sealed in snow, under a threatening sky.

The most prominent building in Bannack was originally built as the Beaverhead County Courthouse in 1875. Only six years later, the county seat was moved to Dillon, Montana, and the grand building lay deserted for another nine years. In 1890, it began its new life as the town’s finest hotel – the center of Bannack’s social life and a temporary home to many Montana travelers. It closed forever in the 1940s, and today stands empty except for the ghosts that are said to inhabit its deserted rooms. I made many images of the Meade, both inside and out. I use this one in the essay because it is about as bleak an image as one could make.