The document discusses a collection of photographs taken at abandoned movie locations. It notes that while the locations may seem familiar, there is no way to know for certain where they were taken as they are now in ruins. It describes the images as being both beautiful and haunting, transporting the viewer to a colorful yet empty world. Faces from old movies are seen glimpsed through windows or plastered on walls, now acting as ghosts haunting the locations. Both color and black-and-white photos resonate by juxtaposing ordinary scenes with an artistic perspective. The images offer a sense of recognition and validation for the photographer and viewers in visiting these deserted former film sets.

1. I was coming off a three-year methadone maintenance when I began looking at these photographs, and
the acuity my withdrawal produced brought the images here into a festival of remote-viewings. In
Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, he describes the ‘validation’ of being in a theater, watching a movie in
which that very theater is featured, and like that experience - even more common today - these
photographs coruscate in time with places glimpsed briefly by the viewer and forgotten, until one or
two finally drive this point home. Have I been here before? When? Where? Of course, there is no
answer. These images are not riddles or roadmaps; they are what they are: beautiful and haunting
reminders of ‘everydayness’, meant to be appraised on their own, but more satisfactorily as a whole.
Yes, they are poetic, and each one is baited for the intrepid, but it’s their stark pentimento that is the
ultimate fix.
Even Eggleston, that baronial saint of color photography, would appreciate the rhyming jewels of ruby
and emerald; and although there is no geographic orientation, these photos exist in a candy-colored
world devoid of the messiness of peopled streets and human interference. When we do see a face, it
has already been relegated to the never-ending process of art: John Wayne, plastered on a bathroom
door, or Marilyn, the eternal ghost, haunting a glassy enclosure. The ghosts reappear through the prism
of windows, akin to a filmic montage, symbolic in their intentionally skewed perspectives - the world
reflected becoming the world offered - transforming otherwise ordinary displays of objects into obscure
objects of desire.
The signs are especially pleasing, whether hand-painted, spelled out with manufactured letters, or in
sputtering neon rainbows: they entice and signify while simultaneously directing our eye to the squalor
they now apprise. In a break from the color, the black-and-white photographs, both hot and cool, in
their correlation to the classic noir/indie netherworlds of pre-color/small-budget films, resonate in their
mysterious shadow and light or in their spectral gray, ordered simplicity. Their commonality is an
heroic reverence to their subject matter, which their juxtaposition here can only serve to heighten – one
against the other.
It should come as no surprise that the subliminal flicker of recognition within comes from a hearkening
familiar source which you may have inhabited. You are looking at abandoned movie locations - each
photo taken of, around, or inside a ghost town, sacrificed to the cinescape of film. It’s not important to
know which film or even to be a film buff; it is a bonus in the offering, however. And you can be sure
that this collection evolved from the obsession of a moviegoer who explored and discovered what was
real and what was façade, but found along the way that these destinations (most of them now in ruin or
renovation) were the jumping-off point for his validation, which the viewer can now happily find worth
visiting.