Bodie, California - USA 1993

Another trip from a long ago time, last century, last millennium actually. One tends to forget many details of trips that lie long in the past, but that´s one reason I started photographing. I not only found photography per se interesting, but always thought that it´s a good way of documenting things. With my way of remembering and storing events and the like tidily in my brain (I just can´t do it), pictures are just a good way of recalling and remembering.

The ghosttown of Bodie in California is perhaps a place too special to forget, but I´m still glad i have these photos for the details. For example after a few years I couldn´t remember the color of the landscape and I completely forgot about the bullet riddled Shell sign. 

Cemetery with town in background. The Standard Consolidated Mine hovering above everything else.

I always wondered who would place small artifacts like the childrens shoes into the scenery.

Tourists, or the Artifact Placer of the State Park Administration?

In early California travel guides Bodie was described as a ghost town in 1915, even

though people still lived there. Sure enough, the decline had set in. The Post Office

closed in 1942, shortly after that the last inhabitants left town.

The Wild West Town well survived into the Automobile Age...

...even though a wild west mentality still prevailed.

The bank´s safe.

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