Time and Other Thieves

Time and Other Thieves

Due to a seemingly endless winter of perpetual cold and snow in my little part of the world, I decided to travel for some new scenery to not only inspire some new images, but to see something different for myself. I don't travel often, not as much as I should, and this has to do with this sense of distance from home - sometimes it feels like you can become lost both literally and psychologically if you stray too far and too long from home. Since home is nothing but a dreary panorama of snow and ice now, I decided to go to the desert, specifically to California. I shot over one thousand pictures there, capturing everything I could find that may create some new vistas for my imagery. I visited the often captured Salton Sea, and specifically the ghost town of Bombay Beach, essentially a small, forgotten neighborhood in decay on the beach. It is also the lowest town in the United States, in terms of sea level, and the desolation is everywhere you look. Forgotten homes, a crane in decay on the shore, and everywhere at your feet are dead gulls and fish. A sad place, an interesting place to visit, and one I thought could set some scenes for my pieces.

This piece uses something I found while there: a doorway, standing on its own, with nothing behind it. It seemed odd that the door frame would be the last remnant standing of whatever was behind it, but then, metaphorically, it seemed perfectly poignant. The entire area ignited my imagination that this is the world of man after man is no more - all forgotten, all being consumed by the world, all will fall into remnants and memory, a footnote in the timeline of this world. It is a fine metaphor, this doorway, which might have once been someone's home, now lost to time and neglect and circumstance.

I wanted that sense of ghosts, the passing of an age. I imagined that this image represents the midpoint in a slow dissolve from a thriving town to the total absence of anything manmade. We are in the middle of that cross fade here, and we see some signs of man: the door, the distant citadels peeking out past the overgrowth, and the man himself, slowly fading away. The only elements here suggesting permanence are the flora and fauna: when we are no more, this world will likely continue as it has before we arrived - the birds will still be here, the sky will still unfold above, and nature in all its cyclical growth and decay will press on, swallowing up everything we created - from our simplest dwellings to our mightiest towers.

The Salton Sea lends itself to such thoughts - you can almost view it as a glimmer of things to come. It is quiet, it is quite pungent with decay, and there is a strong primordial air about the place. It is unsettling to contemplate a ghost town because we are designed to need a sense of home and permanence, something to withstand the relentless change that is nature itself. We need to matter, and though that may seem hubristic in the big picture of the history of this world, it is this need for permanence that compels us to create, to build, to record what we know and who we are. It certainly compels me to create - my images are my time capsule, my epitaph, my bid for immortality, futile as it may be. In a place such as this, it's easy to feel the futility of that desire, but then, it also makes you realize the need to be aware of the Now, the present, and the importance of a sense of home while you have it.

The foreground image was shot at Salton, the gulls were captured on a beach not far from there, and the two towers in the distance is a shot of the Mormon temple I snapped in San Diego. Model Ed Barron is my "ghost of man" in the scene.

my title comes from a line in a Joni Mitchell song called "Furry Sings the Blues:" "he's fallen to hard luck and time and other thieves…"

A Before and After version of this image can be seen on my Facebook page at: www.Facebook.com/MichaelBilottaPhotography