NATURE RULES
California is dotted with a network of machines out of time. Equipment, sophisticated, rugged and played out. Once used to tame or cultivate the wild west, they languish now. Powerful they may have been but in the context of the nature they tried to civilize, they are like discarded kid's toys surrounded by a timeless vastness.
The fifty mile plain is bounded by the Temblor Mountains on the northeast and the Caliente Mountains on the southwest. The San Andreas fault snakes through the plain.
One of the sunniest places in California, temperatures are often above 100 but skid below freezing on winter nights.
It is desert dry and agriculture is a struggle.
These are the skeletons of a hard fight. In their decline
they create a marvelous art. In these shots are a context,
a sense of place and time and a look at once marvelous and new technology.
As always, the land will play the last hand.
See you down the trail.
One of the VPs at Road and Track magazines parent company has spent years photographing old cars and trucks that have been left to nature. He is about to publish a book of the pictures, old trucks with trees growing through the cab, 20s era cars surrounded by brush, paint scoured off by wind and rain, a 50 Mercury convertible with an entire weeping willow that has grown up through the rusted out flooe panels and now surrounds the old Merc.
ReplyDeleteGreat minds think alike!
It almost feels like these machines, which you've photographed so lovingly, have been abandoned on another planet.
ReplyDeleteI was think the other directions - what these machines may have done in the past - who operated them and what their lives were like
ReplyDelete