Challenge: Art of 2011 (Advanced Editing VII*)
Collection: 2012
Camera: Nikon D90
Lens: Tamron AF 18-270mm F/3,5-6,3 Di II VC LD Aspherical [IF] macro for Nikon
Location: Salton Sea, CA
Date: Jan 15, 2011
Date Uploaded: Mar 5, 2012
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I took this on my first trip the Salton Sea - a rather astonishing and breathtaking journey, and it's beckoning has haunted me ever since. I've been back twice since (once with  LevT and once with  melethia. It is almost impossible to appreciate it through pictures, but it's uniqueness keeps begging us to try. I presented several of these images at a group show last year, and wrote the following in trying to describe its allure. Please forgive the lengthiness:
It would be very easy to dismiss the Salton Sea as a collection of eccentricities, failures, excesses. A symbolic representation of all that is American folly. Dozens of unbuilt, planned communities surround the Sea - vast, empty lots comprised of nothing but streets scratched into the crumbling, dry dirt. The promise of paradise and exotic destinations rings in the street signs poking out of the ground like bristles: Panorama Drive. Desert Shores. Capri Road. Venice Lane. The Salton Sea is a resort destination that failed, leaving behind pier pylons in the middle of the desert, and streetlights in the middle of the water.
But it would also be an unfair dismissal. The area is vast - over 500 square miles - and there is almost no one there. Only the private, the eccentric, the proud, the pioneers, living side-by-side the cast-off pieces of living. They are like ghosts, surreptitiously carving and transforming the elegant and inevitable disintegration that surrounds them. One can hear children laughing, dogs barking, calls to dinner - yet never see a soul. Like a soundtrack playing over an abandoned movie set, there is palpable excitement, a sense of great expectations, a story unfolding with no audience to witness it.
At the Salton Sea, the garbage, the useless and broken pieces of obsolete lives, are a living sculpture in the process of dying and rebirth, encrusted with salt.
Perhaps it is the sheer volume of it all, which our minds finds so incomprehensible, and which requires more than just our eyes to appreciate. We must also use our hearts and souls to absorb the sights of the Sea. For there is undeniable, albeit haunting, beauty everywhere you look: in the detritus, decay, death. Some believe it is the quality of the light - filtered through the dense air, 226 feet below sea level. Or the way the sound is both deadened and echoes off the distant mountains. Or the sheer incongruity of a 376 square mile body of salt water in the middle of the desert. For me, the Salton Sea seems supernatural.
It is impossible to comprehend or even appreciate its magnificence unless witnessed firsthand. Barring that, it is my hope that these images convey the emotional depth I experienced while there. |
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