version 1:

version 2:

Look at these two pictures. They are two of about 25 that I took of this weird target-thing(?) out in the Utah salt flats (on an airfoce bombing range, actually) and I am having an impossible time figuring out which one I like more. Honestly, I find both of them flawed, and if I were still in Utah I’d head out for at least one more go-around.
The lighting in each is quite different. The top image was taken shortly after noon, but the bottom picture was taken about 60 minutes before sunset. I like how the bright sun really draws out the bleakness in the top image, and the backlit sign looks particularly menacing. Where as the bottom image has more depth, and while not as menacing, I do like seeing more of the texture and color of the target. I am also really excited about the swath of light on the far horizon- it creates and almost unreal looking perspective.
The cropping of the shot is also quite different. Although pretty much from the same angle, the camera was probably about four inches higher in the top image than it was for the bottom image, and this created some vastly different outcomes. I like how the higher angle in the top image shows off more detail in the ground, but I also like how the square of the target intersects with the horizon. The top image is ground-heavy, while the bottom image is sky-heavy, and I am just not sure which one is working better.
And then of course there are just the natural elements that I cannot control, like the clouds and how they are interacting with the sun/light. Ultimately, that is the biggest thing, and is why I’ll often spend hours/days/weeks/months trying to get a shot (i am usually shooting 16mm film as well). I like the clouds in the top image more then the lower image, but as I mentioned before, that distant patch of sunlight on the horizon is pretty great too. Light is so amazing and weird; I will hang out waiting for the light to get a shot, but often find that the sun+clouds don’t do what I thought/hoped they would. I feel like I am getting better at recognizing cloud formations and predicting how they will affect the light, but it is always a guessing game.
If I could go back and re-shoot this shot, I think I’d try shooting it in the morning, or maybe around 11am, so the target and the cracks in the ground were a little more back-lit, but that might make for tricky exposures because the sun would be closer to being in the frame. I also think I’d inch in a little closer, and mimic the cropping in the top photograph, but lower the camera an inch or two so I could get some of that intersecting with the horizon line thing going. I’d also like to see this on a day when there are no clouds in the sky at all.
(i’d love to hear opinions on the two picts- if you have a favorite please let me know!)

The Lincoln School in Metropolis, Nevada, opened in 1914 and closed in 1947 and is pretty much all that is left of the town. Metropolis was a planned ranching and farming community founded in 1909 that reached an estimated population of 20,000 people, but water shortages and bad luck had it’s way with the town and by the 1950s it was all but abandoned. Below is the road to Metropolis, the town of Wells is about twenty miles away. These pictures were taken at 5:45 am on May 17, 2007.

Walking the streets of Wendover on the Utah side, one might think that the town was recently hit by some form of natural disaster. Junked cars, boarded up houses and abandoned mobile homes are decaying away in abundance. Vacant lots and abandoned trailers are filled with trash, the shells of burnt out homes sit waiting to be bull-dozed, and “closed to occupancy by order of county health dept” signs nearly rival in number the amount of homes that actually look to be kept up and lived in. It is an economically depressed community, to say the least.

I have always been amazed at the ability of trash to attract more trash. It’s like if someone dumps an old refrigerator on the side of the road, someone else comes along and decides that that means it’s okay for them to dump their old dishwasher. If a house is abandoned and the yard is filled with debris, then somehow it becomes okay to start using that yard as a place to dump trash. When I was living in New York last summer I remember stumbling upon a rusty heap of an old Ford cargo van that had been dumped in the nieghborhood where I was staying. I assumed that it would be towed away, but a couple days later the van was still sitting there, but now it was full and over-flowing with boxes and boxes of brochures for the local water-taxi service (a business which just happened to be down the street). A couple days later I walked by again, this time to find that not only were the van and the thousands of brochures still there, but several empty paint cans and bags of trash. The van was now just a centerpiece of what was becoming an island of garbage. As I walked away I noticed a man wheel an old dish-washer up to the pile and add it to the collection, and I realized that the abandonment of this van had somehow granted permission to the entire neighborhood to dump their refuse there too. It was like if the new trash you were dumping came into contact with the van, or at least touched some trash that was touching the van, than somehow it was okay.

This tradition of accumulating trash left in or around abandoned things is strong in Wendover, and it is clear that the town is in tough economic times. This is in harsh contrast to the Nevada side of Wendover that’s just over the hill, a recent boomtown that is swelling with casino resorts and new suburban growth. The state line runs right through the middle of town, and within inches of this border start the glimmering monstrosities of corporate casino world. West Wendover (or the Nevada side of Wendover, depending who you ask) is awash with new development and large scale investment from giant corporate casinos, particularly the Peppermill, who are seizing the opportunity to cater to sinning Mormons from Salt Lake City who come to Wendover in droves to cross the border and partake in the lively activities Nevada has to offer. I don’t think there is a single independently owned business in West Wendover or a building over 30 years old, yet every weekend its parking lots are flooded with Utah license plates and its casinos are filled with over-confident college kids, grumpy truck drivers, and zombified retirees tethered to slot machines by coiled credit card lanyards that look like some sort of evil IV drip cord.

The state line is painted across the main street running through town, but beyond the immediate economic differences in Wendover, the border between Utah and Nevada is perhaps the most culturally dramatic state line in the US. On one side you have Utah, the chiseled down version of Brigham Young’s grand vision of the great Mormon empire Deseret and perhaps the most religiously conservative state in the country. The divide between church and state in Utah is fuzzy at best, and the state boosts the strictist liquor laws in the country. Much of Western Utah is a no-mans land, populated by some of the largest and dirtiest military, industrial, and toxic-waste sites in the nation. On the other side of the border you have Nevada, a state that allows high-stakes gambling, tolerates prostitution, and has the laxest liquor laws in the nation (there is even a State law that renders public intoxication legal, and explicitly prohibits any local or state law from making it a public offence). Wendover, as a town, is caught in the middle of this cultural divide, and the economic disparity is a result of the uneven rules and regulations imposed by those cultures. On one hand is a fantasyland of unsustainable freedom, and the other a bypassed wasteland of abused and neglected terrain.

The locals joke that if it wasn’t for the atom bomb, toxic waste, and casinos, (in that chronological order) the town of Wendover would never have existed. But it seems to me that the real reason for Wendover’s existence has more to do with all the things that it isn’t. It isn’t a natural environment that people would want to live in, making it ideal for bombing ranges and waste incinerators. And “sinful behaivor” isn’t tolerated in Utah, making the escape that Nevada provides all the more tempting and lucritive.

the BEAUTIFUL carpet designs of Wendover NV casinos:
The Wendover Nugget:

Montego Bay:

The Rainbow:

The Peppermill:

and last but not least, The Red Garter:

THE HUE OF WAR!

usually it’s pretty quiet here on the base. with the exception of the passing trucks on their way to the potash plant or the occasional airplane landing on the runway, things are relatively quiet and peaceful. but this evening things got crazy: out of nowhere it suddenly sounded as if we were under attack. the sounds of explosions and machine-gun fire shook the unit, and it seemed like for one instance we were in really big trouble. kristin posehn (my art-residence room-mate) and i looked out the window to find the air filled with yellow and pink smoke, so we quickly grabbed our cameras and the binoculars and snuck out the back door and up into the tower.
from the tower we could see that in the empty barracks across the way a large group of people, clearly associated with the military, where involved in what looked like a giant game of war. men dressed in camouflage gear and carrying M-16 rifles where running around pretending to kill one another while colored smoke bombs filled the air like some crazy circus event. kristen and i huddled down in the tower watching and laughing, and surely breaking some patriot act law by photographing the entire thing.
i found the choice of colors particularly curious. i mean, of course pink and yellow represent some of the most primal, aggression-inducing colors out there, but in some ways it all seemed more like some bizarre fourth of july celebration than a real simulation of battle (or at least the battles i have seen in movies). (actually, perhaps that is how battles really are, and it’s the movies that have them all wrong…) PERHAPS they too were just trying to make some art. maybe they are a little jealous of us over here at the center for land use interpretation and this was there way of saying “hey, check us out, we can make cool stuff too!” i hope that is what it was.

The Sun Tunnels

Yesterday I decided to pack up the van and drive out to the Great Basin Desert and track down Nancy Holt‘s earthwork/sculpture The Sun Tunnels. I hadn’t heard much in the past about Nancy Holt or the Sun Tunnels, but after some recent recommendations and a curiosity to check out that part of the region I figured I should make the trip. Holt, born in 1938, is perhaps best known for her collaborations with, and marriage to, Spiral Jetty creator Robert Smithson, but after seeing both the Spiral Jetty and the Sun Tunnels I have to argue that Holt’s work is perhaps the more powerful. She has made a couple other large scale, site-specific sculpture installations, as well as several films and videos that I am very eager to check out.
The Sun Tunnels are in a very remote part of northwestern Utah, truly in the middle of nowhere. They are fifteen miles out on a dirt road and at least 90 miles from a gas station or anything even resembling a town. The tunnels sit in the center of a sprawling basin that was perhaps the work of an ancient glacier, and a two hundred mile view in every direction reveals that the bumpy dirt road leading to the site is the only visible sign of human activity. On the approach, you can see the tunnels as a speck on the horizon, and they slowly grow and take shape as you approach on the bumpy road. A casual passer might easily think this was the work of alien powers.

As I got lost trying to find the ghost town of Lucin (which you must drive through to get to the Sun Tunnels) I realized that the process of experiencing Holt’s work of art had already begun; in fact it had started hours earlier. Looking at maps, filling water jugs, and toping the tank off with gas was all part of it, as was getting lost in the desert. The adventure and anticipation of heading out into the great unknown, experiencing the landscape and the climate, and transversing a maze of seldomly used roads was all an important part of the overall experience. Maps do not list roads as tiny as these, and the directions I found on the internet forgot to mention several forks in the road, or the fact that not a single structure in the town of Lucin is still standing. Wandering these dirt roads, which are really no more than two tire tracks through sage brush, you have to think about how tiny you are and how reliant you are on technology. There is no water out there, no phones or cell coverage, and no passing traffic; if your car breaks down you are in big trouble. I meditated on the question of how long it had been since I last changed the oil in the Red Barron (my trusty mini-van with over 170,000 miles on it) and promised it that a tune-up and a new set of tires where just on the other side of this road-trip.

Completed in 1976 and several years in the making, the Sun Tunnels are a configuration of four concrete, tube-like cylinders, or tunnels, that are maybe ten feet long and nine feet in diameter. The cylinders are positioned to align with the sunrise and sunset of the summer and winter solstice, and have small holes in their sides that allow the viewer to see out and rays of sunlight to shine in. In a lot of ways The Sun Tunnels are kind of like a modern day version of Stonehenge; they chart the yearly and daily cycles of the sun while calling attention to the scale and depth of the overwhelming desert landscape. They also remind me of the work of James Turrell in how they deal with light and frame the landscape into fragments. Sitting inside the tunnels, the world outside breaks down into bright, hot circles, while the space inside the tunnels remains cool and soft.

Things seemed to be going good, and we were so far out in the middle of nowhere, with no place really to go and such a clear view in each direction, that I thought perhaps this was a good time to experiment and let Tess off her leash. When we are out in the un-fenced world I usually keep her tied to me with a 15 foot long piece of rope, but she’d been so well behaved lately I thought maybe she really didn’t need the rope; maybe she’d stay close even if she wasn’t leashed. I un-hooked her, and for the first couple minutes she didn’t appear to notice that she wasn’t connected to me. But soon I could tell that it was finally sinking in; she realized that she was no longer tethered and her eyes lit up like firecrackers as she started darting towards the horizon. I called her to come back, but she only looked back at me with a glimmer in her eyes. I couldn’t tell if it was a “hurry up let’s go explore!” kind of look, or a “ha, sucker, I’m outta here” kind of look, but either way she looked very happy and I feared that the husky “call of the wild” was echoing through the valley. I knew things were now really up to her, but I tried yelling one last time, actually shouting, but this time very sternly with anger in my voice. Although she was probably 200 feet away from me, she slowed to a stop, paused, and then looked back at me with consideration. For a moment it seemed like she was weighing her options: Matt? Freedom? Matt? Freedom? I doubt she understood that, with her thick coat and lack of teeth, she wouldn’t survive in the hot desert very long, but I understood and realized that if she ran away there would be no happy endings. But then, upon making a decision, Tess started galloping back towards me at a speed I never thought I’d see her move. Her tongue was flopping around, her ears were folded back in an aerodynamic fashion, and she was kicking up a cloud of dust as if she was racing towards the finish line of the Iditarod. She zoomed right by me, made two circles around the van, then jumped into the open side door and looked at me like it was time to go. I said ‘good girl’ and clipped the leash back on, unsure whether or not the experiment was successful, but very sure that I didn’t need another nerve-racking jolt like that for the rest of the day. She gulped down some water and then we went and sat in one of the tunnels and enjoyed the shade and cool concrete. While that was perhaps the scariest three minutes I have experienced in awhile, it didn’t seem to faze Tess one bit. She has actually been amazing on this trip and is proving to be a wonderful traveling companion.