when landscaping fails

Desert Cen­ter, Cal­i­for­nia lies about halfway between Indio and the Col­orado River, halfway between a hot, flat desert town and the Ari­zona bor­der. Unless you need to stop for gas, you pass by it on I-10 at wide-open high­way speeds. It’d be a blur like any other anony­mous desert town if it weren’t for the palm trees.

The huge date palms there grow single-file in for­ma­tions that describe wide cir­cles, V-shapes, or a tri­an­gle that’s many acres across. Trans­planted there by Stan­ley Rags­dale in the early 1990s, most of the trees now have seen bet­ter days. Even for drought-tolerant date palms, irri­ga­tion is essen­tial here in the low desert. The water­ing proved inad­e­quate and many of them died. In their cur­rent state of falling into ruins the trees are visu­ally amaz­ing, the veg­etable equiv­a­lent of the Acropolis.

Palms 1, Desert Center

James SOE NYUN: Palms I, Desert Cen­ter, California

I first went to pho­to­graph the town and its trees in 2003 on a hot, breezy day in April. It was approach­ing noon, and there was no shade other than what a min­i­mal palm trunk could pro­vide. It’s not the sort of light­ing sit­u­a­tion that a lot of pho­tog­ra­phers con­sider accept­able, but for this body of work it was per­fect. Besides, so many of the well-known 19th cen­tury expe­di­tionary pho­tographs of the Amer­i­can West were taken in harsh con­di­tions sim­i­lar to what I encoun­tered. Palms I, above, and Palms II, below form a dip­tych: Imag­ine Palms I on the left and Palms II on the right.



James SOE NYUN: Palms II, Desert Cen­ter, California

There weren’t many struc­tures there next to the inter­state, not much beyond the oblig­a­tory cafe and gas sta­tion. The big sur­prise, though, was an aban­doned school, com­pact, con­structed of brick, and mod­ern in its archi­tec­ture. It had almost no win­dows in the class­rooms except for high cleresto­ries place beneath broad, shel­ter­ing eaves. Not that dif­fer­ent from the schools I attended up in the Los Ange­les area, I thought. In photography–and in paint­ing for cen­turies before it–ruins are often a bit of a cliche, but name me a land­scape pho­tog­ra­pher who hasn’t shot some at some point. I couldn’t resist:

Desert Center School

James SOE NYUN: Breeze­way, Aban­doned School, Desert Cen­ter, California

Both the palm trees and the town clearly had seen bet­ter days. Stephen A. Rags­dale, the man who founded the town in 1921, died in 1971. Stan­ley Rags­dale, the one who directed the plant­ing of the trees, died in 1999. With­out their ener­gies, this area of the city fal­tered, and the palms began to fail. The town and these land­scapes shot there func­tion for me like North­ern Euro­pean van­i­tas paint­ings, reminders of life’s strug­gles, its short­ness, and the cer­tainty of entropy. Again, those aren’t tran­scen­den­tally fresh ideas, but to see them par­tic­u­lar­ized in a place that’s strug­gling though still very much alive fas­ci­nates me. Judg­ing by the num­ber of peo­ple who leave the high­way, gas up, then drive slowly towards the palm for­ma­tions, I’m not the only one who’s fascinated.

For more infor­ma­tion on Desert Cen­ter see: Wikipedia / The Cen­ter for Land Use Inter­pre­ta­tion.

For more infor­ma­tion on the large series this images are a part of see: James SOE NYUN: Blue Day­light Project.

November 30 2007 02:42 pm | Categories: art • landscape • landscape design • photography | Tags: • • •

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