Exploring Texture and Form in the Barren Landscapes of the Salton Sea and Beyond
Frederick Sommer reveals the inevitable as art
In total acceptance, almost everything becomes a revelation. — Frederick Sommer
Have you ever photographed a dead animal? It sounds eerie, like something you’d see in a bad horror movie. My proximity to the Salton Sea near Palm Springs, California, is a hot spot for death in the summer. The air reeks of decaying fish, an odor that reaches the Coachella Valley miles away every year. It is a nauseating time of year in the Southern California desert.
Yet, the incongruity of it all is overwhelming, and photo ops appear everywhere, however morbid they are. After visiting the Salton Sea a few times during the summer, about an hour from Palm Springs, I returned with photos of the decomposing bodies of several life forms
Walking along the Salton Sea shore is a surreal and noisy experience. Every step crunches over sun-bleached fish bones, remnants of a once-thriving ecosystem. Summer in many deserts worldwide brings high temperatures often soaring past 120°F, turning the landscapes into a sizzling, otherworldly furnaces. The stifling heat wraps around you, seeping into your skin like a frying pan turned to high. Decay, heat, and desolation define every moment along this haunting shoreline.
As my favorite photographer dead and decaying life, along with capturing barren landscapes without horizons, Fredrick Sommer was a genius. Perhaps after reading this article, you’ll be seeking carcasses, as that is a part of his photography repertoire. Maybe, you’ll even visit the Salton Sea during the summer.
When you contemplate decay, the first thing that comes to your mind probably isn’t texture and form, not to mention the undeniable fact that death is something that happens to all of us. These aspects of the passage of time were Sommer’s point.
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