Dead Cars In The Desert
My first real digital video was done in the Mojave (but it was lost long ago); I’ve done a bunch more since then. The California and Nevada deserts have always fascinated and strongly attracted me (probably for all the wrong reasons), and while I’ve been taking photos of them for decades, it wasn’t until cheap digital video came along that I started making videos out there to document what I saw and felt about the desert. Some of the videos here obviously reflect the strong ambivalence I feel about the way humans have settled the desert and left so much wreckage and junk lying around (there’s a reason someone once jokingly summed up my photography as “dead cars in the desert”), but I try not to beat people over the head with it. My views are a lot less black-and-white than most people assume (enough so that I get flak from all sides) — there’s definitely real beauty and attitudes to admire in the strange juxtapositions of humans and deserts, and I hope some of that comes through here every now and then. If you’ve ever watched the wonderful documentary “Darwin” about the small Californian High Desert town of Darwin (a place I’ve been to a bunch of times, just passing through), you might recognize the phenomenon…
Promised Land
Promised Land summarizes a lot of what I ambivalently feel about humans and the Californian deserts, and it does it to a gorgeous soundtrack by local Bay Area industrial ambient noise band (and personal friends) Relay For Death. It’s also my longest video, and was shot in a bunch of locations from Amboy, CA, to the northern bits of the Owens Valley.
Drive-By: Desert
My first attempt to make a video about human settlement and the Mojave, backed by Mahler’s Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde (from his Das Lied Von Der Erde). I get criticized a lot for that soundtrack, but I always knew from long before I shot the video itself that I’d be using it — what could be more appropriate than a florid stretch of Western Art Music? I did a lot of the video shots the same way I did the oilfield shots — by hanging a small 720p DSLR out my side window and driving very slowly. I’m really tempted to do an updated version in the next year or two…
Drive-by: Yucca Forest
One of the few desert videos here that’s simply a celebration of the desert itself, in this case of a Yucca (Joshua Tree) forest in Death Valley National Park, a forest that’s a bit off the beaten track and that I try to visit every year. The video is made by the soundtrack, a piece by local musician (and friend) Roxann Spikula, who also drove my Subaru along the desert tracks here while I sat on top of it holding my iPhone taking the raw video footage (yes, it’s an iPhone video, and no, it wasn’t done with a drone).
Dumont Dunes, California
One of my earliest desert videos, documenting a President’s Day gathering at California’s Dumont Dunes, an ear-splitting mass of dune buggies, ATVs, off-road bikes, pickups, and RVs I stumbled across almost accidentally. I’d never really seen anything like it before, and everyone was unfailingly nice to me (the Australian accent probably helps), and I enjoyed myself immensely. The original soundtrack was Ministry’s Jesus Built My Hotrod, but I got dinged by Youtube’s copyright thing for that and changed it to the current bland beat. Oh well. I may put the Ministry version back up one day — it works well.
Machine Mood 2 (Nevada)
Tire marks and donut marks on dry desert lake beds and playas — what could be more authentically Californian (and Nevadan) than that? One of my Machine Mood series; soundtrack by Roxann Spikula.
One Train: V
It’s just a silent video of a long train moving through the Mojave Desert’s Afton Canyon late one afternoon, right? I have this … thing … about trains in the desert that sort of gets explored in more detail in the Desert Trains gallery, but here’s a sampler for the Desert Videos gallery.