A quaint long-distance calling poster from the 1930s still hangs on the wall over the telephone directories in the lobby of the old Strater Hotel in Durango. Now that cell phone packages have replaced conventional long distance toll calls, the poster promoting the use of a phone as faster and cheaper than writing appears nostalgically humorous in this era of instant and constant connectivity. Just across the way stand several phone booths, originally designed for the convenience of the hotel’s visitors. Today, most of the phones that were once in them have been removed.

It came at us out of the clouds, a steel clad ghost bristling with guns. It was the Liberty Belle, a restored World War II B-17 Flying Fortress. I made this image through the windshield of a moving car, getting off only two shots before it vanished again. This was one of them, photographic proof that I was not imagining things. It had taken off from Lawrence Municipal Airport in North Andover, and I caught it in the skies over Ipswich. My fast shutter speed of 1/2000th of second has eerily stopped all four propellers, yet the plane still flies – adding a ghostly dimension. I later converted the image to black and white to give it a period look.

Photographing museum exhibits usually produces little more than descriptive visual information. But not this time. The battleship USS Arizona was sent to the bottom of Pearl Harbor by Japanese torpedo bombers on December 7th, 1941, taking nearly 1,200 American sailors with it, and bringing the United States into World War II. An exhibit “Flagship of the Fleet: Life and Death of the USS Arizona” is a fixture at the Arizona State Capitol Museum. While a rusted fragment of the ship’s hull is the focal point of the exhibit ( see http://www.pbase.com/pnd1/image/111595488 ), a tattered, yellowing life preserver from the ship runs a close second. The preserver is mounted in glass case, which is backed with a vintage photograph showing a sailor aboard the ship. What drew me to it was an eerie reflection – the left hand side of the glass case was reflecting a ghostly version of the sailor back into the display. The more we look at it, the more likely we are to travel back into this sad and terrible story. While the sailor is grim, his reflection seems to grieve. The yellowed life preserver provides context for both.

This room choed to the arguments of politicians, starting in 1901. It was the scene of the creation of the Arizona State constitution in 1912. The lawmakers have departed, moving to new quarters in a nearby building. But the debates can still linger in this chamber, if you have a good imagination and listen closely enough. I climbed to the visitor’s gallery overlooking the chamber in order to anchor the image with the delicate lighting fixture that first blazed at the turn of the last century. I use a diagonal composition to draw the eye from these lights to the legislator’s darkened empty desks and chairs below. By spot metering on the lights, the room itself goes into shadow, giving the desks and chairs a ghostly presence, and taking us back into time itself.

The symbolic line between past and present in this image stands at the spot where the light gives way to the shadows. I place the lower edge of the frame on the lower edge of the first step leading up to the doorway of this elegantly restored 19th century brownstone home on a Manhattan’s East Side. With such placement, I invite the viewer to step into the frame, and climb with me towards the gilded lights that still burn, even though the night has now passed into day. The building itself is wrapped in abstracting shadows, yet we can make out the reflections of the brilliantly illuminated foliage in its elegantly arched window glass. Vines flow from two balconies, and the glow of reflected light softly warms the stone façade. I wanted this image to take us back to another time, and thanks to the contrast between light and shadow, it does.

The shades are still drawn against the brutality of the Arizona sun. The old office, cooled by those shades and a single fan, housed Arizona’s governors for more than 60 years. I made sure to expose this image so that the softly glowing figure at the desk becomes shadowy and thus more alive, obscuring the fact that we are actually looking at a mannequin. The figure represents George Wylie Paul Hunt, the first governor of Arizona, and the man largely responsible for its constitution. Hunt served as governor from 1912 to 1919, again from 1923 to 1929, and still again from 1931 to 1933. Through light, shadow, and color, I’ve tried to roll back time here in my own way.

Old buildings can be considered “time machines.” They may function in the present, but they can simultaneously convey the essence of another time. The art deco Luhrs Tower, built in downtown Phoenix in 1929, was one of the city’s first skyscrapers. (Pbase photographer Alain Lucier describes its external appearance, as viewed from Patriot Square Park. See it by clicking on the thumbnail at the end of this caption.) I chose to photograph its small but evocative wood, brass, and marble lobby, suggesting the presence of the ghosts that should be riding its elevators and walking its halls. I made this photograph on a weekend, which proved both a blessing and a curse. I was glad that there was nobody around to inject the present into the mood of the past here. On the other hand, the building was closed and the front door locked. I had to make this image by pressing my lens up to the windowpane on that front door, decidedly limiting my vantage point. Using my spot meter, I underexposed the scene to stress the shine on the brass mailbox with its glistening mail chute, an incongruous anachronism in our era of email. The ornate elevator doors seem to glow – we can imagine the uniformed men who must have operated them in the 1930s and 40s. The stairs leading to the lobby are dimly seen – suggesting, perhaps, the phantom footsteps that may spring to the imagination when we look at this scene. The great depression began the same year this glorious lobby was built. The Luhrs Tower still speaks of that time in this place.

Just outside Death Valley National Park, New York dancer Marta Becket created the Amargosa Opera House in the 1960s. The opera house has an art gallery featuring mysterious masked mannequins at its windows -- this one peers at us through its lace curtains. The design of the curtains suggests an earlier era, while the masked face behind them is more ghostly than real. I tried to strike a balance between revealing the face and only suggesting its presence, using both the curtains and exposure to abstract the masked figure. The image asks more questions than it answers. Why is the mannequin there? Why is it masked? And why is it hiding behind a curtain? I guess Marta Becket would know, and she is not talking.

The old Fox Theatre in downtown Bakersfield was once a palace of dreams for moviegoers growing up in the middle of the last century. Using a camera with a 28mm wideangle lens, I tried to evoke a dreamlike feeling in this image of the Art Deco tiling that swirls out of the shadows gathering around the theatre’s original box office. I use the brilliant reflection of sunlight on the shiny tile to pull the eye into both the box office and the design of the tile. I repeat the curve of the tile design with a curving black shadow of the theatre marquee that occupies almost half the frame. This black curve is the portion of the image I left open for viewers to fill in their own details. This bold abstraction could represent the symbolic darkness of the theatre within, or perhaps the ominous threat of the wrecking ball that hangs over many old movie palaces.

As I watched this blur of a man, cell phone clasped to his ear, rush past copies of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Arizona Republic, it occurred to me that if he was in the same spot eighty years ago, he would probably be thinking of enjoying a delicious slab of Mission Ice Cream. This fading message from Flagstaff's past overwhelms the scene, but he will never see it. Yet my camera did, and for the moment anyway, this image juxtaposes two entirely different visions of time.

A carefully embalmed passenger car of the long defunct Pennsylvania Railroad stands behind an eroding wall near Winslow’s train depot. This car was named after Louis Sockalexis, one of the earliest Native American baseball stars. Ironically, Sockalexis's career burned briefly and brightly, and then crumbled into oblivion. And so did the railroad that once honored his memory. By juxtaposing this gleaming but ghostly railroad car against the crumbling wall, I turn the tables on time. The old train becomes new again, while the world decays around it.

Two Guns was one of numerous tourist traps along the now abandoned US Route 66 between Winslow and Flagstaff. At one time it had a campground, gas station, and a zoo. When Interstate 40 arrived, Two Guns went into decline and is now a ghost town. Its major feature is this water tower, depicting an early, somewhat angry proprietor named Two Guns Miller. Although time has taken its toll on the stereotypical figure on the tank, I try to make the past live again by placing part of the tower in the lower left portion of my frame, and devoting most of the image to the billowing clouds that, with a bit of imagination, bear at least a passing resemblance to gun smoke.

Advertisements come and go on the side of this old building in downtown Flagstaff. The abstracted layers of painted pleas for attention speak of the ebb and flow of business over the years. It is all about time. I add context to this patchwork of paint by including the old clock in the foreground, which is all about time as well. It not only tells us where we are, but it also tells us approximately when this block of buildings was built. And of course it tells us the exact time I made this image. Once again, the past and present merge in both space and time.

Seligman is another one of those small towns that once lined the Arizona portion of US Route 66 – the “Mother Road.” I spent my brief time in Seligman searching for visual clues to its nostalgic past. This battered relic of that past likely had its best days on Route 66 before the legendary road was bypassed by the new Interstate highway system. With this close-up study, I offer a metaphor for that loss and displacement. The scarred, rusting surface of the car mocks the sleek and shadowy chrome decorations that once represented, along with Route 66 itself, “modern times.” Once again, the past briefly appears before us, this time wearing the guise of a car that stopped moving a long time ago.

In stark contrast to the café in the previous picture, this US Route 66 cafe is very much in the present, yet it also draws heavily on the past for its meaning. In 1984, Williams became the last town to be bypassed by the US Interstate highway system. Cruiser’s Cafe sits alongside of what once was Route 66. It is now Williams' Main Street. The huge mural pays homage to the legendary automobiles that once made the long run from Chicago to LA -- and passed right through the heart of Williams. The foreground layer of this image, which consists of the tables, chairs and umbrellas of the café itself, seamlessly blend into the background layer of the mural. We view the past here in present day terms -- my image is as much about the diners who will soon fill those tables, as it is about the romance of a defunct highway.

Generations of debris give Seligman's eccentric Snow-Cap Drive-in much of its character. How long has this sign that once helped sell malts and shakes to Route 66 travelers, been bleaching in the grass? The effect of time on the sign is startling. What once was intended to attract attention now shocks and repels. It almost seems as if the Snow Cap Drive-in itself is lost to the past. Yet it still sells malts and shakes only a few yards away from this rotting sign. We are looking at an image that I made in the present, its subject one that is already lost in the past.

Ash Fork, a Route 66 town about 25 miles east of Seligman, has little left to show from its days as railroad town and highway rest stop. They tore down its elegant Harvey House hotel. A fire did the rest. Today, the bypassed remnants of Route 66 still serve as Ash Fork's quiet main street. The lone reminder of Ash Fork’s glory days serving traffic on Route 66 is this motionless car cruising through the clouds on top of a local gift shop. This surreal image is rich in incongruity, a 50s fantasy come to life. The rakish, cloud-crowned sedan, with its dimly perceived driver (sideburns intact) recalls the nostalgic past, while the gift shop below places it firmly in the present.