Bodie State Historic Park

These images were taken from Bodie State Historic Park, a preserved former gold mining town, high on the Eastern Sierra in California. Historians and curators under the direction of the Bodie Foundation keep the site in a state of arrested decay as a non-commercial ‘ghost town’.

The town was named after Wakeman S.Bodey, who was one of the first to answer the call when the news of the discovery of gold in California hit the Eastern seaboard in 1845.

It is located east of the Sierra Nevada mountains at 8,396 feet altitude, more than a mile and a half up and well above the natural tree line – meaning the original settlers had to bring in wood for construction from several miles away in the valley around Lake Mono.

The town often becomes completely inaccessible in winter, due to freezing temperatures and heavy snow, while in the summer months it suffers from high temperatures and drought.

The town’s heyday was between 1878-80, the resulting building boom created a city atmosphere, with most of the eligible sites of the downtown areas quickly filled. The building materials and styles for the majority of domestic homes in Bodie followed conventions across the region.

By the late 1880s, with Bodie in decline and only two of the former nine stamp mills still operating, there were three times as many vacant buildings in town as there were inhabitants. The roaring camp at the start of the decade with a population of 8,000 was now reduced to 500, with the stagnation of real estate and financial distress as businesses left town.

Bodie was by far the biggest town in the area, and so when Bodie declined, its buildings dispersed along with its residents. There are examples everywhere in the locality: in Bridgeport there are residential and commercial buildings from Bodie, Tioga Lodge on the shore of Mono Lake, has buildings taken from the town, and there are said to be Bodie buildings in the areas of Lee Vining and Hawthorne.

In 1973, the film High Plains Drifter was shot at the edge of Mono Lake, ten miles down the road from Bodie. Directed by and starring Clint Eastwood, this film was set in the fictional town of Lago. There is no solid evidence within Bodie’s archive that Eastwood’s film crew ever visited the historic park, but Lago is a mirror image of the town.

The Bodie Foundation have been extremely supportive in relation to my research and I have been privileged to be able to access some of the interior spaces of the former domestic dwellings, being in some cases the first person other than state park rangers and Bodie Foundation staff to be allowed into the buildings since the early 1960s. Even the dust covering objects and furniture inside the rooms is subject to strict regulations to prevent disturbance from its official state of ‘arrested decay’.

As a photographer, this experience gave me the opportunity to explore and refine working methodologies related directly to my practice, and to develop a body of visual work with which to move forward in my research.

These images are a work in progress towards a larger portfolio of visual material that compares and contrasts the fiction and constructed reality of the original settlers and the homemakers in the ‘Wild West’