Amarillo – Twelve Megabytes for The Ant Farm

Another predawn expedition on our recent trip took me to the outskirts of Amarillo. I’d been curious about the Cadillac Ranch for years. This was the place where they buried some cars in a cornfield so I wanted to have a look. Back in 1974 the project was the brainstorm of a local iconoclast (who prefers to be called Stanley Marsh 3).  He was assisted by an unusual group of friends known as the Ant Farm.

I was never sure what I’d think of the Ranch,  and now that I was in Amarillo I wasn’t even sure where it was. My atlas indicated that the ten Cadillacs were located somewhere west of the city on the south side of I 40. This also happens to be the former path of Route 66, and so it was undoubtedly considered a perfect place for the half-burials.

I drove out there and couldn’t find them. It seemed I needed coffee.

There was a Starbucks on Soncy Road at the previous exit. I returned, wondering if my family was still asleep at our nearby motel. Inside the coffee shop, the two employees who took my order debated the best way to send me to the Cadillacs. I thanked them and headed back, this time with plenty of caffeine  and several sets of directions.

I found the Ranch right away. It was right off of the Interstate in a field just like the one in my imagination.

As you can see from my photograph, the cars have been spray-painted over the years. The interesting thing is that Marsh and the Ant Farm have encouraged everyone to do this. Purists argue that the original Caddys were far lovelier with their peeling factory paint and without all the annoying graffiti.  Now that I’ve seen the cars in person I completely disagree. I’ll elaborate on that in a moment.

In the meantime, empty cans of paint littered the ground in open defiance of Texas law.

Being a photographer, I noted that the sun was about to peer over the horizon, so I got to work. The impulse is to stand back from the cars in order to take a group portrait. I have to admit they look good from back there (something like a GM version of Stonehenge).  But I also felt I was taking pictures of a Little League team. I took a few anyway and they looked like all the other ones I’d Googled back home.

I decided to go in closer. What I discovered, is that when appoaches the cars they inspire a palpable sense of reverence. I sidled up to one. The fins were high above my head and looked especially wonderful in the first rays of daylight. I was feeling something like one of the apes in Kubrick’s 2001 and so I placed two fingers on a wheel. I was surprised that it spun freely.

Of the pictures I took after that, the one I liked the best was the one at the top of my post. Truthfully, it’s not easy photographing someone else’s artwork.

The problem is, whose artwork is it exactly?

These handsome vehicles were first penciled up by a creative team of designers back at General Motors. That was a long time ago, so I don’t know if anyone has properly celebrated their achievements. Years later, ten Cadillacs were dragged from their various junkyards to be partially interred here in a cornfield. This was not an easy task and involved the use of a crane and other massive equipment. Like it or not, Marsh and his friends made an auspicious attempt to clarify the meaning of the cars. They also remade a landscape.  Since then, anyone who has sprayed any paint here has tweaked the project slightly, and those who of us who come here and take the pictures have taken it somewhere else.

Everyone’s involved at Cadillac Ranch. It keeps going.  That appears to be the point.

Did I spray paint something?

Yes. I picked up a couple of spent cans and shook them until I found some paint. Carefully aiming, I hissed out a tribute on a wheel strut.  I did this for Joe Strummer, the former frontman for The Clash who would’ve thought the Ant Farm rocked.

It was red paint, of course.

Abandoned Outhouse on the Texas Panhandle

During the final week of August, we drove 500 miles of what remains of historic Route 66. Being contrarians, we headed east rather than west, traveling from Santa Fe over the mountains to the gentle farmlands which envelope Oklahoma City. It was a trip through the high plains, which crossed the 100th meridian near the Oklahoma border. In one sense, the journey met our expectations, because what remains on the crumbling roadsides of Route 66 resembles much of what you find elsewhere. It’s sad (but  not surprising), to drive from one town to another only to find 90% of it boarded up. This is a national trend (at least in some rural places) which is by no means exclusive to Route 66. On the plains, it becomes painfully obvious.  The village vacates. The strip dominates. Walmart, McDonalds and other large chains quickly become the new town centers. Whether we like or not, we increasingly rely on these areas because we really don’t have much choice. In many small towns, finding a slice of home-made pie is as likely as finding a clam in a wheat field. Unfortunately, the fast food out by the interstate is the only place registering a pulse.

I’m no expert and maybe there’s more below the surface. On the plains,  there are survivors. Demographics shift. People are seasoned and tough. Whatever is still standing remains to tell a  story.

To a photographer, the high plains can read like our best poetry. It’s where you need to be if you want to see what change looks like. There isn’t any place better to study the shape of derailed plans. The details speak. Peeling paint has passion. Boarded up gas stations can still fuel an imagination. Abandoned churches convey much authority, and nothing  is more lyrical than a forgotten motel.

I made a number of similar images but will start with this one – an abandoned outhouse east of Amarillo. This (the tiniest of all structures) is a building which has stood its ground. It was perched near a pump house at the edge of a field so far from any dwelling that it seemed uncanny. Like everywhere else on the prairie, there was no shortage of space here. These are landscapes ruled by the wind. The outhouse has endured much of it, only to be enriched by a leaning pose.

Abandoned Home, Approaching Storm – North Dakota

This photograph is another from a series of pictures captured during a visit to the Dakotas. It was late June trip, and there had been abundant rainfall which resulted in many square miles of unimaginably green grass. We’d traveled west from Minneapolis to the left half of North Dakota – a beautiful part of the state and the location of the home in the photograph. From the look of the sky that morning  it seemed  likely that a serious downpour was imminent, but unlike the opening scene of the Wizard of Oz, our clouds raced away.

This was a trip mainly taken for photographs – and for me, it was photographing abandoned structures such as this one that brought the most excitement.  In both North and South Dakota we found many similar structures – each fading back to the prairie with what often amounts to a surreal presence.

Whether or not the sight of abandoned dwellings is depressing depends on one’s point of view.  The furor in North Dakota that erupted after the publication of Charles Bowden’s article The Emptied Prairie in National Geographic a few years ago is a good example of how this topic can be viewed from a variety of thorny angles. The article wasn’t meant to be so personal, but it was about North Dakota. In case you missed the small print, the point about failed assumptions and the resulting decline of population applies to many other places west of the 100th meridian too.  North Dakota isn’t alone, it just took the rap.

From the point of view of photography, abandoned houses never depress me. On the contrary, I find them passionate and inspiring. I have no apologies about this because they make me create. Whenever I’ve encountered them, I feel like I did when I focused my first Minolta lens.  Some of my earliest black and white pictures were of houses similar to this one. I stumbled upon them during a drive to Virginia’s Eastern Shore and felt like I’d found buried treasure. I’ve organized trips around finding them and and have gone to places like North Dakota specifically for that reason. And while I’m out there I should add, I also camp, hike and enjoy the view. I have good memories of meals I ate in remote places and have found comfortable beds in clean motels.  Not everything looks like this in North Dakota, and if you need to know the truth, they have their share of strip malls and faceless suburbs just like the rest of us do. But for the most part, this is a state that comes down emphatically on the side of rural. One hundred and thirty years ago a fellow New Yorker named Theodore Roosevelt fell in love with the place and I can’t say that I blame him. If they decide to sweep all their ramshackle homes, trucks and sunken churches completely off the landscape then they’re doing us all a great disservice.

Why photograph old stuff? I’ve asked myself this question and get a variety of conflicting answers. One of the purposes of this blog, in fact, was to try to find an answer to this question.

Some say it’s about metaphors.  I don’t dwell on such things when I’m taking pictures, but it’s clear that for some, an abandoned house is a symbol of sadness and misplaced expectations. To many others however, the same left-behind home can represent longevity and strength of character. For the family that lived within its walls, there must be no end to persistent memories.

I believe the falling-down places speak with a very clear voice.  They tell us what we’ve forgotten. They’re Willa Cather. Their worn textures can scratch the imagination like a fresh match and their fading colors can invigorate recollection. Their smells, and the sounds of the insects in their grass can help form bigger pictures.  I don’t know about you but I like it when that happens. From my point of view, these places point to how simplicity functions and how things become beautiful when they’re placed in the landscape thoughtfully.  We seem to have a hard time remembering that these days. Most importantly, every time you drive past an abandoned home you’ve just read a page of your own history, and for that reason alone every single one of these buildings is vital.

More of my photographs of abandoned structures can be seen at this link:

http://johntodaro.wordpress.com/category/viewpoints/solitary-structures/

Abandoned Structures/High Plains – Hasselblad 903SWC

Another from western North Dakota taken with the Hasselblad 903. I’ve called this one Quiet House. More images of abandoned structures on the high plains (and elsewhere) can be seen by clicking on this link:

http://johntodaro.wordpress.com/category/viewpoints/solitary-structures/

To see other photographs taken with the Hasselblad 903 SWC, go to the same menu and click on Square Format-Hasselblad. You’ll find additional commentaries about the camera at several of those posts.

One-Room Schoolhouse, Western South Dakota

We encountered this building a number of years ago while driving across South Dakota. I’d been hoping to see such places and so we’d driven the entire state on the grayest highways we could find on the road map.

We climbed out of the car into a landscape which mixed the serene with the surreal as effectively as any Hopper painting. Around and behind the building there was nothing but grass as far as you could see –  a scene of such elemental minimalism that it was close to breathtaking.  For me, finding these places has become the defining moments of many trips and I’ve never been able to walk away from them without engaging the camera.

Between the 1890′s and the 1950′s one room schoolhouses existed at regular intervals across the high plains. These were the same years when the middle third of our continent underwent a radical transformation – and as we all know, the changes didn’t come easy. If the prairie was easy to plow it was often harder to tame.  The wooden grain elevators and other structures have now mostly faded into the landscape. Perhaps what remains is totemic, an expression of a deep-rooted simplicity that belongs to that landscape and belongs with us as a people. If the buildings stay with us, they will be the relics of an uncomplicated esthetic that existed before the arrival of modern clutter.

While I was taking this picture, my wife and two year old son played nearby in the grass. For me it was easy to conjure up the bygone recesses… running children in hand sewn-clothes, scolding teachers and fifth grade crushes. My son was oblivious to those thoughts because it was June and a good time for insects. The winds picked up and I walked around the building with my camera. Each side seemed to have it’s own game – four courts of light and four plays of texture. Above us the sky was strewn with clouds – distant, but at the same time appearing unusually close. My wife and son sat down on the doorstep and I took pictures of them. When we peered in the windows we discovered desks, shelves, furniture covered with blankets and a long-forgotten piano.

Yesterday I found a link to historic photographs of Kansas one-room schoolhouses. The site is an excellent example of an archive doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. My wife and I spent much time poring over the pictures, especially the class portraits. These were auspicious warm-weather events with kids in their finest clothes – days when everyone was ushered outside onto the grass to pose before the large camera. The children formed a group and their teachers were placed behind them. Everyone stood still and the exposure was made filling the air with the smell of magnesium flash powder. Behind the class the photographers kept it simple…always the school house and maybe a glimpse of prairie. You might find, as we did, that the faces of the children will unleash your imaginations with the details of their many possible stories:

http://www.kansasheritage.org/orsh/Gallery/index.htm

More images of abandoned buildings from the Dakotas (and elsewhere) can be seen by clicking on this link:

http://johntodaro.wordpress.com/category/viewpoints/solitary-structures/