“Man at the Edge of Wilderness”
I recently got to attend a meeting of the Granite Library Photo Club. The guest speaker was the excellent photo journalist Russel Albert Daniels (check out his work here). We were asked to submit up to five photos for critique towards the theme “Man at the Edge of Wilderness”, a constant motif in Daniels’ own work. What a great opportunity and exercise. I looked through my photos with this theme in mind and came up with the five below.
This photo was taken in Skull Valley, just west of Salt Lake City. The conflict between the desert landscape and snowy mountains and the nuclear waste sign was pretty striking to me. Although many might see the desert as a barren wasteland suitable for nuclear waste, it’s actually an important ecosystem. The sign also appears to be riddled with bullet holes, which is just very Utah.
I took this photo of Georgia O’Keeffe’s bomb shelter during the tour of her home in Abiquiu, New Mexico. Abiquiu is just north of Los Alamos, where much of the Manahattan Project was conducted. All the anxiety of that time and place went into O’Keeffe’s decision to carve out this shelter in the back of her house. I don’t know how effective a structure like this would be against a nuclear blast, but I found it interesting to think about how we use the desert as nuclear dumping ground, but also use the earth to shield us from the same poison (and from ourselves).
I took this photo at McKay Mine in Idaho. One of my favorite things to photograph is old abandoned places. I spend a lot of time scouting around on Google Maps, trying to locate obscure locations off the beaten path. I’m not sure what function the above building served (residential? storage?), but it was built on the side of the hill. At some point, there was a landslide, which you can see is starting to crash the left wall. The pressure of the dirt and rocks have cause the boards to bend inwards. Some of the overhead beams, which would normally be straight across, have started to bow under the pressure. While this site was used many years ago to exploit the earth’s natural resources, the earth is starting to swallow it back up.
These last two photos sort of go together. I took them both on the same day and in the same area, but thematically, they are two sides of the same coin.
Thanks again to Russel Albert Daniels for the opportunity and feedback. Be sure to check out his work, not only for the photos, but also the stories behind the beautiful images.
