17-OCT-2004
Face in the Window, Bodie, California, 2004
This building was built in 1880 to house H. Ward’s undertaking business. Today, one of its windows is lined with silvery insulating material. When editing this image, I was astounded to see what appears to a mysterious Lincolnesque face of a man gazing at me within that window. I underexposed the facade of the old building to intensify the mysterious feeling of this incongruous apparition.
17-OCT-2004
Tuba, Bodie, California, 2004
Built in 1878, the Miners Union Hall was once the center of Bodie’s social life. An annual Fourth of July grand ball, a masquerade ball on Washington’s Birthday, and Christmas parties were held here. At the far end of its ballroom, now a dusty museum, is an old painting of a shipwreck. Below it is an old piano, bearing a battered tuba on its top. I was drawn to this juxtaposition of symbols because of its incongruity. The waves in the painting filling the background of my image were utterly alien to Bodie, and perhaps represented a touch of romantic fantasy for those who once danced beneath them. The tuba that serenaded those dancers is now mute and dented, much as Bodie itself has been abused by man and nature and is now forever silenced. Neither tuba nor town will ever play again.
17-OCT-2004
Decay and Beauty, Bodie, California, 2004
Buildings such as these once housed people who lived hard, and died even harder. Badmen, bad whiskey and bad climate were all part of Bodie life. Its streets are now silent, but its bad climate still erodes these battered facades, and Bodie’s badmen have all gone to their graves. The town has died with them. This image, through the interplay of light, shadow, texture, and color, expresses both sadness and desolation, but yet I feel that there is a sense of haunting beauty in this scene as well. It is this tension between such decay and beauty that made Bodie so fascinating to me.
17-OCT-2004
Wandering Ghosts, Bodie, California, 2004
When you enter Bodie you can buy a guidebook with these words on its cover:
“And now my comrades are all gone;
Naught remains to toast.
They have left me in my misery,
Like some poor wandering ghost.”
When you leave Bodie, the last thing you see is this hill, blanketed in golden sage and strewn with the machinery built to extract wealth from the ground. The gold is gone and the town has itself become that wandering ghost. All who visit Bodie will carry a bit of that ghost with them forever.
Like many of my other images of Bodie, this works because of its incongruities. The harsh presence of the rusting machinery rising out of the desert’s wild beauty, the small figure of the man on the crest of the hill incongruously compared to the vast scene at his back, and the warmth of the desert colors compared to the barren skies overhead, are all incongruous juxtapositions that help give Bodie its very unique sense of place
