This image has three components: a foreground full of ruins, delicate trees soaring overhead, and two people walking in step below them. The people seem to take their surroundings for granted – fields of ancient rubble are common in much of Greece and its islands. I see them as walking through history, both ancient and current. The stones on the ground are static, yet they speak of the past. The trees are dynamic and rich in contrast – those in the foreground are covered in translucent leaves, while the trees in the background are chalky white, devoid of leaves. Some of the branches seem to be leading the people through and out of the image. The walkers see none of this. Their world seems limited only to this moment shared between them.

Many of these broken columns are nearly identical in size, which tells us that the original columns were constructed in multiple segments, stacked upon one another. Alexander the Great dedicated the city of Pirene in 323 BC. Its ruins are the most spectacular surviving example of an entire ancient Greek city, intact except for the ravages of time. These broken columns, once part of the Sanctuary of Athena, still lie on the ground where they fell. This Ionic temple was finished during the Roman occupation, and dedicated to Emperor Augustus. The columns are gray in color, and the ground was covered in brownish grass when I made this photograph. By converting the image to black and white, I unify the scene and create a more coherent and timeless image.

( You can see a documentary image of these same broken columns, including a nearby partial reconstruction of the Athena Sanctuary, in Dick Osseman’s pbase gallery on Pirene at:

http://www.pbase.com/dosseman/image/76472615 )

This former French penal colony, made famous by the book and subsequent 1973 film “Papillon” with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman, is off the beaten tourist track, and therefore quite difficult to visit. I was delighted that our cruise ship stopped there for a morning, allowing me wander at will for several hours. The prison has been abandoned for 65 years. I found a derrick rusting away on the shoreline, and I made this closeup image of it, emphasizing its cruel, jagged shape by backlighting it. To me, it represented the character of the old prison itself. I framed it as a diagonal, running precisely from corner to corner, and repeating the original directional flow of the derrick itself. I was able to bring out a bit of the rust in the shadows, contrasting its decay to the vitality of the softly focused green water and weeds in the background.

A hundred years ago, entering this building must have felt like walking through heaven’s gate. Semi-clothed angels looked down from above, granting entrance with a gesture of triumph. Today, the angels are crumbling as the façade itself peels away. The building is still in use – a restaurant occupies the ground floor. Will the charm of the past be restored here? Or is this a last hurrah for a once triumphant angel? This image asks such questions, and leaves to the answers to others.

This image is rich in haunting textures – the jumble of high weeds that surround the old house, the weathered boards on its sides, and even the smooth curtains that hang in the old bay windows. There were no signs of life and the only sound was the patter of rain drops all around me as I shot.

The ancient Tunis medina has been thriving for more than a thousand years. It is full of narrow alleys, mosques, markets, and homes – ranging from palaces to crumbling apartments. This dilapidated structure stands at one of the entrances to the medina, its shutters hanging at odd angles, and its façade a home for emerging weeds. I built this image around the diagonal thrust of the broken shutters that carries us through the frame.

We shot in and around a half-demolished barn for a half hour, and this image was the first of many. It turned out to be the most expressive of all. The barn door is falling off its hinges, missing a board at the bottom, and leaning precariously. It seems about to be consumed by the pine tree that embraces it. The dappled morning sun softly illuminates the weathered boards, and the double X pattern is symbolically appropriate. The barn itself is about to be “X’d out.”

I photographed this old barn door near Nageezi, New Mexico, on the road to Chaco Canyon. It reveals its own history as it sheds its skin and displays its inner workings. I base the image on its geometric structure – the repeating diagonals play against vertical and horizontal thrusts. I under-exposed the image to deepen the rich maroon coloration. It may be falling apart in front of us, yet its underlying strength is there for all to see.

Haynes is strewn with rusting mining equipment, including an ancient Caterpillar tractor. Instead of describing the entire tractor, I stress its ruination by moving in to define its rust and decay. What once rumbled and roared as it scoured the earth to reveal its riches, now corrodes in silence. I wanted this image to evoke the spirit of this mine and the ghost town that now surrounds its ruins.

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.

The last great American gold rush occurred in Death Valley in the early 20th Century. The Eureka Mine was built in 1909. Today, the tunnel into the mine is a place of broken tracks and ghostly dreams. The tunnel is not open to visitors. It was fenced off, requiring me to make this photograph through one of the openings of the chain link fence. This scene could not be seen with the eye – the entrance to the mine was too dark. Yet the sensor of a digital camera can show us things that the eye cannot. It took a one second exposure to get this much detail to appear. By pushing my lens shade up against the chain link fence, I was able to hold the camera steady enough to make this photo. The rock-strewn track enters the mine and then vanishes into blackness. The last things we see are the railroad ties, broken and skewed, just like the hopes of those who invested their money and dreams in the lonely place.

Not much mail is moving through Darwin any more. A virtual ghost town just outside of Death Valley, Darwin has endured the collapse of its mining enterprises, at least three major fires, and the coming of a state highway that choked off its tourist trade. A post office is a symbol of communication, while a boarded-up post office symbolizes a breakdown in human contact. It can also symbolize the realities of the eventual decline and demise of our postal system as we knew it. The faded sign on the old marquee also suggests that someone tried to use the building for another purpose, but that enterprise failed as well.

14th century buildings, now uninhabited, line this palm grove and the irrigated fields along side of it. The fading light contrasts the distant minaret with robed figures working in the fields. The abandoned buildings, palms, and the tiny figures are out of another age, while the minaret and the newer city surrounding it speak of the present. It is this contrast and context that brings these ruins alive and makes time stand still.

Volubilis is a ruined Roman city, not far from Meknes. The Berbers abandoned it in the 9th century. It was forgotten and then utterly destroyed by the same earthquake that leveled Lisbon in 1755. The remnants of Volubilis were excavated in the late 19th century, among them this broken statue of a god. It was resting on the ground, not far from the restored triumphal arch that was originally built here in AD 217. A skeletal plant grows out of its broken chest. Most visitors will not notice this mysterious fallen idol. I found it among the most expressive of Volubilis’s treasures.

They no longer give S&H. Green Stamps here. (They don’t give them anywhere, for that matter. They expired with the turn of this century, becoming on-line “S&H Greenpoints.” There apparently is also a thriving market in their old catalogs. See http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abu/y202/m01/abu0061/s06 )

The irony of the expired premiums notwithstanding, this building clings to its tenuous hold on a corner lot in Paris, Idaho. Each day brings it closer to its end. We can read some of its history in the details – the sign is the most prominent. Yet other significant details emerge as well. Traces of the different colors that have once graced its front door can still made out on its ruined wood. The bricks that flank the door are painted white, letting all know where the entrance once was. The ornamental molding over the door that formerly welcomed visitors has all but vanished. The bricks are gradually giving way from the bottom, up. The weeds have reached the door-step, and the shadow of the big tree at left is just about to envelope the whole left wall. Yet a tiny padlock still keeps visitors at bay – protecting whatever of value may be left inside. We wonder what was sold here, who worked here, and where are they now. An image that asks questions and demands answers of its viewers is an expressive one.

This abandoned automobile was buried in a sea of dried bushes, standing so high that they obscured its windows. I photographed through the screen of bushes, and found the sun glinting off of one of its heavily stained windows It was almost as if the old car was trying to summon energy from the sun for one more run.

This building was once a church. Today it is used as barn. It is full of hay instead of hymns. One of its windows had lost all of its glass, clearly revealing the bales of hay within. I isolated that hay filled window on a field of boards. In spite of its utilitarian function, this window still has a spiritual presence. That’s why we called this place the Church of the Holy Hay.

Sometimes a ruin is well characterized by its smallest details. I’ve abstracted this wheel by using my spot meter to expose for the three highlights – everything else goes dark and is implied rather than described. I convert the image to black and white to further abstract it, and make more of a symbol of an age out of it. Its sleek design speaks of the 1930s. Although covered in heavy dust and untouched for many years, it seems ready to spring to life with a simple touch. For more of the same ruin of a car, see the next example in this gallery.

Lone Pine was once a regular stop for the Southern Pacific Railroad. It is no longer. Its yellow depot sits well out of town, alone and forgotten. It is in private hands now – a family is slowly restoring it. The owner graciously allowed us to photograph here. (You can meet the owner by clicking the first of the two thumbnails below. ) When I shoot a ruin, I rarely, if ever, “show the whole thing.” I usually try to find eloquent details that best tell its story. To me, those key details were the nails that have worked their way out of the old train platform, and the weary bench used by passengers waiting for the train. I include a bit of scenery to give the depot a sense of place – the Sierra Nevada mountains. The Lone Pine depot also witnessed one of the most heart breaking chapters in American history. It was through this station that thousands of Japanese-Americans passed on their way to internment at the nearby Manzanar War Relocation Center during World War II. Click on the second of the two thumbnails below to see an image made at that center.

The fence marks the site of Keeler’s beach on Lake Owens. The lake is no longer there – it has been piped from Keeler to the city of Los Angeles. An old trailer that once served as a beachfront home is all that is left of the “beach.” I include the coil of barbed wire resting on the fence as a symbol of what has happened here. A place that once welcomed visitors now rejects them. The smashed trailer, its aluminum sides gleaming in the setting sun, offers still another metaphor for Keeler’s fate. Home sweet home is no longer the case.

A combine is a machine used to harvest, thresh, and clean grain plants. This is a ghost combine. It is stands near the road, overgrown with plants and weeds, a memory more than a machine. It seemed as if I was photographing a dinosaur, its long neck leaning crazily forward, as if it was lunging at me. The early morning light has given it a golden hue that guilds its deception. It stands adrift, an extinct creature awash in an ironic sea of vividly colored plants.

As with the car in the previous image, this truck has also been left in Benton’s bushes to rot away. Yet the lovely flowering sage growing around it ironically seems to offer a fragrant and beautiful salute. I take a vantage point that stresses the flowers and abstracts the truck behind it. A long mirror extends diagonally from the truck, as if to better see the flowers. But the mirror is black and the cab empty.

To capture the essence of a ruined town, I look for ways to abstract, imply, and symbolize, rather than merely describe its appearance. The 19th century window glass in many of Bodie’s windows offers a perfect reflective surface for my purpose here. The old house reflected in the widow is split and dismembered. It almost seems to be moving between the panes in the window. Much of Bodie’s charm rests in the domain of the human imagination. And so does my expressive purpose here. My viewers can take this picture of a reflection and make of it whatever they wish.

This house is, by all standards, a ruin. Yet the table is ready for dinner, and an incongruous portrait of George Washington looks upon the scene without visible concern. This image asks us to consider the nature of a ruin – at what point does a house become unlivable? The greens and golds in this photo are hauntingly beautiful, even if the walls seem to be on the verge of crumbling. I made this image through a window, and the digital image is far brighter and much more vividly colored than the scene I saw with my own eyes.

This image combines reflection and reality to convey dream like fantasy. I pressed my lens against the front window of a long abandoned house in the Bodie ghost town, and exposed for the light coming in from a side window. Apparently there must have been some space between my lens and the glass of the window because haunting reflections showing other buildings are superimposed on the brownish wallpaper inside of this room. The resulting image is a ghostly dream, a vision of past and present that goes right to the imagination of the viewer. It is an image I had never planned to make. It was, in fact, made for me by pure chance. I will be glad to accept it, however.

I was first drawn to this scene because of the ghostly effect the wavy window glass gave to the old buildings in the distance, and the symbolism of the empty frame on the wall next to it. As I was framing the shot, a shadowy face of an Asian woman suddenly appeared in that stained and ghostly window. I made this image just before she disappeared. I recognized her as a fellow photographer – a woman unknowingly standing in for one of those restless spirits that some say still inhabit this ghost town. History tells us that several hundred Asian people actually worked in the Bodie mines in the 1880s, and this house was in the very area where they lived. For me, it was a happy accident. Her ghostly face adds much meaning to this image, no matter how we may choose to interpret it.

The hills just to the west of this old ghost town turn gold at sunset. These golden hills are in the western facing windows of buildings such as this one, providing a set of hauntingly illuminated rooms in empty houses. I include the two privies in the foreground of this house to add a sense of depth, as well as making the point that many of Bodie’s residents did without plumbing.

The most elegant home in the Bodie ghost town belonged to J.S. Cain. While most doors in Bodie are rustic, his door reflects a degree of elegance – including a glass transom and an overhanging portico to keep the snow off the heads of guests and residents alike. I photographed it at sunset, when the transom turned gold. It almost seems as if Mr. Cain is at home, awaiting his visitors.