Doug Boutwell » Salton Sea

Bombay Beach | Salton Sea | Stuck In The Mud

Doug — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 22:26:02 +0000

Remember how I said in the last post that we got seriously stuck in the mud? Here are a couple of pictures demonstrating what I’m talking about… Mark Becklund had some recent experience with this kinda thing.

Mark's 2nd Time Getting Stuck In Mud In As Many Weeks

Unstuck

You can see the old crane we photographed in the upper right of the image. Worth the risk to drive out there, but damn it was a close call almost getting stuck in the middle of nowhere with evening approaching. Making pictures at the Salton Sea can be a dicey proposition. Maybe I’ll eventually get a real 4WD vehicle…

Salton Sea Photographs | Abandoned Naval Base | Bombay Beach

Doug — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 00:05:26 +0000

I took my third trip to the Salton Sea in as many weeks yesterday, as part of my ongoing photographic exploration of the peculiar kind of desolation one can find there. Mark Becklund, friend and neighbor, was kind enough to join me on the journey this time, and didn’t even bitch about the 3:30AM knock at his door. We loaded up my Honda Element with the usual Speedotron Explorers, Pocket Wizards, a 1Ds MkIII, and an array of Canon L lenses. This time Mark also brought his Alien Bees, and Vagabond Battery Pack, which came in handy, as some of these shots took all 6 studio strobes to overpower the daylight. We drove out highway 10, past Palm Springs, and arrived at our first location before dawn… then photographed all day around the perimeter of the Salton Sea, and headed back to Orange County after the sun had set over Bombay Beach. In return, I bought him a can of Bombay Beach Fish Assholes. Seems like a fair trade ;) I hope he made some amazing photos as well, and he was a big help rigging up my lighting so I could make my pictures happen. Thanks Mark!

In the process of getting here and there, we managed to get both a flat tire, AND get stuck in the mud at Bombay Beach. I had the bright idea to drive out onto the shores of the Salton Sea to get closer to an old crane that had been partially submerged on previous visits. I figured that my Honda Element had AWD, and we had gotten lucky a couple times previously… but it had been one time too many, it seems, as we ended up spinning our tires in the mud near the flooded shores of Bombay Beach. Thankfully, we were able to get it unstuck with a combination of digging the tires out, letting out some air, putting some boards under the wheels, and having me push from the back. I love my Honda Element!

On this trip, we managed to find a way into the abandoned Salton Sea Naval Auxiliary Air Station and Test Base. Took some doing, even after some extensive research on Google Earth, but it was worth the hassle, I think. A couple buildings were still standing from the WWII-era naval base, plus the remains of the old seaplane launch ramp, the faint outline of the old runway, and a couple of concrete-reinforced bunkers.

Inside The Bunker

Salton Sea Naval Auxiliary Air Station

Beachfront Property

Lit Street

After exploring the remains of the old Navy base for several hours, it was onward to the far South side of the Salton Sea, where we encountered this fallen tree on the way to a ruined dock.

Recoiling

Changing Hut

School's Out

Unfinished Construction

I still feel like there so much more to see and photograph at the Salton Sea. It will take several more full days of shooting for me to feel like I’m finished shooting all the weird and wonderful things out there. I love the way shooting these twisted forms with daylight flash casts a strange, artificial light, and the weird things I find out in the high desert make a perfect subject.

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Salton Sea Photos | Desert Shores | Salton City

Doug — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 20:25:05 +0000

Yesterday I took another trip to the Salton Sea, as part of my ongoing little photography project. Skies were partly cloudy, which made things a little more hit and miss than usual, but having that texture there was really nice when the photos did work.

Still so much to discover… I was driving along a nameless road, toward the old Salton Sea Naval Air Station, which is where they tested the casing for the A-Bomb back in the 40s. Not sure if there’s anything there to photograph anymore, except some ruined foundations and the remnants of an airstrip, but I thought I’d go see anyway. Unfortunately, the road was completely covered by sand dunes about 4 miles from the main highway. I took a couple of them in my Honda Element, but stopped short of a monster 15-foot-high pile of sand lying right across the road… technically the Element is AWD, but with the stock tires and no one there to bail me out, I thought better of taking the gamble… another adventure for another day, I guess…

Right before that dune sat this burned out truck. Not sure how it ended up there, but there it was. Still not sure if I like this picture more, or the one looking the other way where you can see the dune.

Stranded

Also found some other new stuff to photograph, and revisited some old…

Save The Sea

Salton Sea Yacht Club (sic)

Sundial

Pants

Sidewinder Golf Course

Sea View

Use Boat Ramp At Your Own Risk

And finally, a little homage to Christopher Griffith – wasn’t thinking of this when I casually snapped the pic, but it works as a treatment for the photo, I think. Christopher Griffith is a badass, and if you haven’t seen his book States, then you really are missing out. One of my favorite photo books of all time. He has a new one out, too, which I have yet to pick up. Anyway…

Cut Off

Next time, I’m bringing a map…

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Seeking Closure

Doug Boutwell — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 18:42:29 +0000

The Salton Sea has held a place in my imagination since the first time I laid eyes on its derelict buildings and abandoned shacks lying knee-deep in salt and muck. I figure it’s about ten years ago that I first went out there, on the recommendation of Tim Douchette. Tim was a bartender at Wolfgang Puck’s cafe, where I was working at the time. He hailed from Brooklyn, worked part time as a driver for UPS, and occasionally ventured out into California’s deserts to shoot stuff on his Pentax 67. He had a shaved head and a deep-voiced New York accent, which fit the bartender mold perfectly.

I was a photo student at the time, and had never really embarked on a trip more than a few miles from home in pursuit of pictures, so when Tim and I got to talking about the wacky stuff he’d heard of at the Salton Sea, I jumped on the idea. We met at 3am one morning after a long night at the restaurant, and drove the long 3 hours down I-10 to the shores of the Salton Sea. To a student photographer, looking for anything interesting to put in front of the lens, it was like Christmas and my birthday rolled into one. We explored both the north and south shores, hitting up the abandoned resort at North Shore and the tracts of collapsing mobile homes at Salton Sea Beach, finally making it all the way to the farm fields on the east side at sundown. By the time we made it to the flooded waterfront at Bombay Beach, it was night, and after shooting a few long exposures on my Mamiya Super 23, we packed it up and headed home.

For a kid from Orange County, where the shiny veneer of newness is inescapable, and beige stucco boxes pass for architecture, having something dirty and old to photograph was enticing. The quasi-ghosttowns that lined the Salton Sea’s polluted shores, strewn with the remnants of broken dreams and failed cities, were fascinating both as an art and archaeology. Hastily abandoned homes, still full of personal posessions and debris, posed a giant question mark that, to me, seemed to loom as large as the ones over Pompeii or an old Inca ruin. I couldn’t help but think of the Salton Sea as some parallel universe, which gave us a glimpse of what Los Angeles or Palm Springs would have looked like if something had gone terribly wrong at some critical juncture. On paper, the Salton Sea had most of the ingredients of a thriving resort, except that the only things that had ever taken root there were some ramshackle buildings and a whole bunch of mobile homes. How we got from its optimistic beginnings, to the state is was in when I first visited in 1999, was a bit of a mystery.

Over the last decade, I’ve been out to the Salton Sea with a camera at least every couple of years. Each time I discover something new and strange – some new piece of the puzzle, or fastinating, out of place artifact: a playground half-buried in salt, a boat beached among the bushes, or a line of power poles leading through water to nowhere. Each one provides some evidence of civilization’s struggle against the body of water it created by accident, of the losing battle people have been waging since the 1950s to make their plans work.

It’s also a photographic journey that has consumed way too much of my time and attention, but also one that I’ve approached way too casually. It’s always been a day trip with a friend, just to show them around and snap some photos. I’ve never set out to create a serious body of work around the Sea, and never really committed to doing anything but take the occasional photo here and there. So now I’m going to do just that, and then hopefully I can feel like I’ve shot all there is to shoot there, and I can move on. After all, it’s a big world, and even I am starting to remind myself of the professor in Art School Confidential, played by John Malkovich, who paints nothing but triangles (great movie, by the way).

All that’s required is a little commitment, so a few weeks ago I decided that I’d head out there at least once a week until I’m done shooting it. Last Monday, I spent the first of several days shooting the Salton Sea, and hopefully they’ll end with a collection of photos that don’t suck, and I can be done.

Abandoned Home and Tree

Tire Dump

Pink Stove

Power Poles To Nowhere

Our Place Saloon

Burned Out Double Wide

Salty Bones

Tree Boat

SS Valentino Towing

Sea View

I was hoping for clouds, but I’ll live with clear skies. The idea behind lighting everything was to make it look a little more artificial, and therefore surreal. The goal is to give a somewhat slick treatment to very imperfect things… to shoot ugly things in a pretty way, if you will. The abundance of fill light also helps to create a somewhat ambiguous environment, making the time of day and some of the other literal specifics of the scene a little more obscure. I wanted to make this stuff look like it could have been shot in a studio or a soundstage… not literally like a set for a movie, but I wanted it all to betray a subtle sense that the scene had been manipulated, or at least a little sterilized, visually.

Learned a lot from this shoot, and hopefully I’ll be back at it next week, marching toward some sense of closure on a body of work that began back in art school.