Bodie, a genuine California gold-mining ghost town a few miles from the Nevada border, was once a booming, brawling, blasphemous town of 10,000 – a “sea of sin, lashed by the tempests of lust and passion.” I want you to first see where it is – a cluster of brown structures adrift on a landscape so barren it defies description. A city of ghosts afloat no longer in a sea of sin, but on a sea of sage. To express a sense of place, I emphasize the sage and de-emphasize the town itself in this shot. A dusty trail (so dangerous that I sprained my ankle on it a few moments before making this image) leads us straight in to a church – the most lofty structure in this most villainous of towns.

Mining tools and equipment still litter Bodie. Nothing has been picked up. Stuff sits just where it was left. This wagon has not moved in over 60 years. And that is why I photographed it in this manner. The grass has been cut, allowing visitors to easily move around Bodie, yet it has been left to grow over the rim of this wheel. I move in that rim and symbolically stress that point: the land under Bodie continues to live and grow, but the town itself remains dead and silent.

Not much is left inside of this church, the only house of worship still standing in Bodie. The Ten Commandments, painted on oilcloth, once hung behind its pulpit. Unfortunately, those commandments, including “Thou Shalt Not Steal,” have long since been stolen. There is really nothing left to this place but darkness. And so I use light to abstract this image, and hone it down to a bench and lectern. We see very little, and hear less. The image speaks of silence. This empty, soulless church, which in its day saw many a funeral, has finally become a ghost itself.

I shot these dust-covered balloon tires through the window of a long closed store. To me, tires symbolize progress and transportation, and Bodie, which reached its peak of popularity in the 1880s, was basically a horse and wagon community. Yet here were these old tires, stacked away near the window of a local store, dust covered icons of progress in a town were progress was once measured in body counts.

When I began creating a relationship between these two Bodie houses, I intended to build a sense of mystery into this picture by abstracting the house at left through underexposure, and merging its dark shape into the house in the sunny background at right. And that is exactly what I accomplished. However when editing the picture on a large screen, I noticed detail for the first time that added a new dimension to my sense of mystery. Could that be a TV or radio antenna incongruously sprouting from the house at right? It could be a relic from the 50s, or maybe a park employee lives there, enjoying both the past and present simultaneously. In any event, there is definitely something on the roof of that house that is out of synch and out of time with Bodie itself. It is as if someone one living in the Old West was suddenly projected forward into the future by 100 years. Ah, those details. What would we do without them?

Willy eyed me patiently as I photographed him in sitting on a dresser in the living room of what once was the house of a man named Tom Miller. I thought it appropriate that Willy, who, except for his white ruff and belly, is essentially a black cat, lived in a town of ghosts. I made sure to capture his reflection looking back into the ruined past of Bodie. When Willy realized I had nothing to offer him but a few more clicks of the shutter, he left me alone in Miller’s dusty living room. (Pbase artist Tim May, who was shooting along with me in Bodie, later showed me a picture he made of Willy carrying a large dead rabbit clamped in his jaws. The killer instinct still flourishes in Bodie!)