It was Julian’s idea to go back to the ghost town of Bodie. It seems to be one of the traditions of our trips to the Eastern Sierra. (Here are some photos from last year’s visit to Bodie.) Along with photographing Julian under the mamoth statue at the ski lift in Mammoth Lakes. (Here’s last year’s Julian and mamoth in Mammoth photo, this year’s still to come.)
On this trip I was mindful that I didn’t need (or want) to document Bodie. I already have plenty of photos of the place on file, and anyhow, I am not a documentary photographer.
I also noted that from a curatoral perspective Bodie is in a state of arrested decay, as much as possible left as it was in 1962. This means there are weird artifacts and surfaces all over the place. So I tried for compositions that showed the unusualness of conditions at Bodie, rather than portraying things as they are (or attempting to portray things as they might have been when Bodie was the second largest city in California).
Above, a photo of the Bodie school room through a mesh protective grill (you can see the classroom globe in the background). Below, through a store window looking at pressed tin walls and a dusty hunting trophy. Did I imagine that the deer turned a red and baleful eye upon me as I snapped the photo?
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