The Salton Sea has held a place in my imagination since the first time I laid eyes on its derelict buildings and abandoned shacks lying knee-deep in salt and muck.  I figure it’s about ten years ago that I first went out there, on the recommendation of Tim Douchette.  Tim was a bartender at Wolfgang Puck’s cafe, where I was working at the time.  He hailed from Brooklyn, worked part time as a driver for UPS, and occasionally ventured out into California’s deserts to shoot stuff on his Pentax 67.  He had a shaved head and a deep-voiced New York accent, which fit the bartender mold perfectly.

I was a photo student at the time, and had never really embarked on a trip more than a few miles from home in pursuit of pictures, so when Tim and I got to talking about the wacky stuff he’d heard of at the Salton Sea, I jumped on the idea.  We met at 3am one morning after a long night at the restaurant, and drove the long 3 hours down I-10 to the shores of the Salton Sea.  To a student photographer, looking for anything interesting to put in front of the lens, it was like Christmas and my birthday rolled into one.  We explored both the north and south shores, hitting up the abandoned resort at North Shore and the tracts of collapsing mobile homes at Salton Sea Beach, finally making it all the way to the farm fields on the east side at sundown.  By the time we made it to the flooded waterfront at Bombay Beach, it was night, and after shooting a few long exposures on my Mamiya Super 23, we packed it up and headed home.

For a kid from Orange County, where the shiny veneer of newness is inescapable, and beige stucco boxes pass for architecture, having something dirty and old to photograph was enticing.  The quasi-ghosttowns that lined the Salton Sea’s polluted shores, strewn with the remnants of broken dreams and failed cities, were fascinating both as an art and archaeology.  Hastily abandoned homes, still full of personal posessions and debris, posed a giant question mark that, to me, seemed to loom as large as the ones over Pompeii or an old Inca ruin.  I couldn’t help but think of the Salton Sea as some parallel universe, which gave us a glimpse of what Los Angeles or Palm Springs would have looked like if something had gone terribly wrong at some critical juncture.  On paper, the Salton Sea had most of the ingredients of a thriving resort, except that the only things that had ever taken root there were some ramshackle buildings and a whole bunch of mobile homes.  How we got from its optimistic beginnings, to the state is was in when I first visited in 1999, was a bit of a mystery.

Over the last decade, I’ve been out to the Salton Sea with a camera at least every couple of years.  Each time I discover something new and strange – some new piece of the puzzle, or fastinating, out of place artifact: a playground half-buried in salt, a boat beached among the bushes, or a line of power poles leading through water to nowhere.  Each one provides some evidence of civilization’s struggle against the body of water it created by accident, of the losing battle people have been waging since the 1950s to make their plans work.

It’s also a photographic journey that has consumed way too much of my time and attention, but also one that I’ve approached way too casually.  It’s always been a day trip with a friend, just to show them around and snap some photos.  I’ve never set out to create a serious body of work around the Sea, and never really committed to doing anything but take the occasional photo here and there.  So now I’m going to do just that, and then hopefully I can feel like I’ve shot all there is to shoot there, and I can move on.  After all, it’s a big world, and even I am starting to remind myself of the professor in Art School Confidential, played by John Malkovich, who paints nothing but triangles (great movie, by the way).

All that’s required is a little commitment, so a few weeks ago I decided that I’d head out there at least once a week until I’m done shooting it.  Last Monday, I spent the first of several days shooting the Salton Sea, and hopefully they’ll end with a collection of photos that don’t suck, and I can be done.

Abandoned Home and Tree

Tire Dump

Pink Stove

Power Poles To Nowhere

Our Place Saloon

Burned Out Double Wide

Salty Bones

Tree Boat

SS Valentino Towing

Sea View

I was hoping for clouds, but I’ll live with clear skies.  The idea behind lighting everything was to make it look a little more artificial, and therefore surreal.  The goal is to give a somewhat slick treatment to very imperfect things… to shoot ugly things in a pretty way, if you will.  The abundance of fill light also helps to create a somewhat ambiguous environment, making the time of day and some of the other literal specifics of the scene a little more obscure.  I wanted to make this stuff look like it could have been shot in a studio or a soundstage… not literally like a set for a movie, but I wanted it all to betray a subtle sense that the scene had been manipulated, or at least a little sterilized, visually.

Learned a lot from this shoot, and hopefully I’ll be back at it next week, marching toward some sense of closure on a body of work that began back in art school.