I cannot say that this month’s blog photos rank among my favorites, but they do represent a very typical experience in my photo practice.
One common technique of photography is to plan or “previsualize" the images you want to make. And upon committing to a trip to Goldfield, Nevada to shoot the historic Goldfield Hotel this last spring, I started previsualizing all the poetic images I was going to take. You see, my hubby and I had visited Goldfield a few years ago and were taken with the old Goldfield Hotel (built in 1902) with some of the interior intact from its heyday - furniture, fixtures, old peeling wallpaper, and especially the hotel bar – all of which we could see only by looking through the dirty windows. We could see its photo potential and wished we had access to the interior, but the “No Trespassing” signs and locked doors put a stop to that. Fast forward to this spring, and a gal in our photo class told us that she knew of a way to gain access to the hotel, where we could photograph the interiors to our heart’s content. Obviously this sounded great, and this excitement inspired this opportunity into a class photo outing. We had so much fun describing the interior of the Goldfield Hotel to our classmates and asserting how utterly cool it was going to be to shoot the arrested decay found in the old hotel. It was going to be awesome!
So in October, five of us made the trip down there – a good four-hour drive. We met our contact in Goldfield and the hotel was opened to us. And guess what…all the poetic, decrepit stuff I planned on photographing…was gone! The hotel had been sold, and the new owners were in the process of renovating it. The old wooden bar where I had planned to spend most of my time and photo energy was on the floor in pieces in another room. The place was gutted! Before photographing, we were given a tour of the building and explored all three floors, but most of it had been gutted too – sometimes down to the framing and drywall. It was a fascinating tour – the guide told us about all the ghosts that live there as well as the heartbreaking stories of the girls who were forced to work in the brothel in the rear of the hotel back in the day (this is Nevada after all...).
But all through the tour I was wondering, “What am I going to shoot now?”
And this is so typical of my photo experiences…I plan the photos I want to take, make a bunch of plans about angles and depth of field and lighting …and inevitably, it doesn’t work out. All my plans and great ideas turn out to be... not so great after all.
So what to do now? There was really nothing that was catching my eye…aside from the monochrome shadows on the floor. So I started there:
The hotel had some long hallways, punctuated by the light streaming in from the doorless hotel rooms, so I tried a few shots capturing these lights and shadows. Later, I tried to shoot some kind of an optical illusion of depth with these long hallways, like this:
I wondered in and out of the rooms, beginning to see the potential in the layers I was seeing - the drywall, the framing, the brick - and took a few photos like this:
And then I noticed some beautiful colors streaming down the remaining drywall, the result of years and layers of water damage. But instead of fixating on the fact that this was just water damage, I began to see these colorful walls as great works of abstract art, being ripped from the framing, never to be seen by the world, only to be disposed of in some landfill in rural Nevada. My mind began to reference photo goddess Sally Mann’s photos of legendary artist Cy Twombly’s studio titled “Remembered Light” which included photos of his studio walls, streaked with the remnants and drips from his masterworks. Now that I had a frame of reference for what I was doing, I began to daydream that I was in a great quest to document these drywall masterpieces for posterity. The afternoon flew by:
When I returned home and started editing the photos, I saw that they weren’t all that great - although I really wasn’t expecting them to be. In the end, they are just souvenirs of our trip to Goldfield...and an afternoon spent in the company of friends, ghosts, and daydreams.
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