"Wherever you are, even in California, nothing is more demoralizing than being there and nowhere else. One of the pleasures of travel is to dive into places where others are compelled to live and come out unscathed, full of the malicious pleasure of abandoning them to their fate. Even their local happiness seems tuned to a secret resignation. It never compares, at least, with the freedom to leave. This is when you sense that it is not enough to be alive; you have to go through life. It isn't enough to have seen a town; you have to have gone through it. With an idea, it isn't sufficient to have thought it; you have to have gone beyond."

—Jean Baudrilliard, Cool Memories II: 1987-1990, p. 43

For this week's exercise, I took some photos from my first trip to California's Salton Sea, in 2011, and processed them. For those not familiar with the story, the Salton Sea is the accidental result of a massive engineering failure in 1905, created when unusually high rainfall overwhelmed the silt-filled canals that had been dug to irrigate parts of the Coachella Valley and surrounding areas. During the two years before the breach could be repaired, the (then-existing) Salton Sink filled with water, and the existing drainage system has kept it full until then. Several towns popped up around the surface of the lake, many in the 1950s, when Los Angeles real estate firms tried to market the waterfront properties as locations for inexpensive vacation homes. There was a real estate boom for several years, until word got around that (a) the Coachella Valley is really really really really hot in the summer, and (b) the Salton Sea is not a great place for water-based vacation homes, in part because the heat and the gradually increasing salinity of the water tend to cause massive fish die-offs in the summer. Which makes the whole area smell awful for several months in a way that's difficult to imagine if you've never spent any time in an area where there's recently been a massive fish die-off. (Yes. Some idiot stocked the lake so that real estate agents could pitch it as a place where you could go fishing.) When word got around, the housing boom collapsed, and the much of the permanent population left.

There's a nice little six-and-a-half-minute short film on the story on YouTube.

But there are still people there, living in towns with names like Niland and Bombay Beach and Salton City, all of which are mostly abandoned and have numerous crumbling old buildings, It's an interesting place: a vastly altered ecosystem to which the local wildlife has become accustomed (it's become a stopover for migratory waterfowl, for instance). There's a massive state park and towns that don't bother to perform maintenance: when mud flows in and covers something that's not particularly important, it stays covered. There's plenty of space but not a lot of available labor. When a shop in a strip of shopping centers burned down, no one bothered to clean it out or rebuild, even though business goes on in the shop right next door. The human population gradually retreats from everything as the incentives to stay seem harder and harder to see.

There is some farming out there (irrigation for farming was, after all, what led to the creation of the lake in the first place), and some of the cheapest land in California, so the people who live out that way are often those who want to spend a little money to get away from nearly everyone else. So there's an interesting negotiation between human desires and ecosystem needs; and the huge number of crumbling buildings gesture towards a weird 1950s aesthetic that's gradually being erased not by changes in consumer preferences but by the environment. Oh, and the locals are, in general, moderately hostile toward tourists with cameras, though there are a number of odd roadside attractions, like Salvation Mountain.

So of course I thought of the leftover photos from this trip in response to this assignment. I picked seventeen off of my hard drive, focusing mostly on the landscapes and waterscapes, and on signifiers that seem anachronistic in the context of my latent background assumption that the apocalypse interrupted the 1950s: seven- and ten-digit phone numbers, contemporary consumer products, etc.

I post-processed these photos intending to create effects that looked like photos taken with anachronistic analog cameras of a variety of types -- sometimes the processing involved using predesigned filters, sometimes not. I then situated them in some Polaroid frames that I'd scanned years ago (which sometimes made the filters look rather incongruous, in retrospect), and laid them over a wood texture in a page-layout program.

Here's the 70-megapixel result. In retrospect, I could have performed some aspects of it with a bit more finesse, but it was an enjoyable project anyway.