Photos: Richard Rothman
Perusing the perimeter of my purlieu, I stumbled across photographic article in The New Yorker by Suzanne Shaleen about a project by photographer Richard Rothman. The article is brief, a concise précis, if you will, of the actual way the events most likely played out in real life. But, article has it, Rothman had to leave his campsite in the North California Redwoods where he was shooting for a project called "Redwood Saw" to head into town for supplies. The town was Crescent City, which had experienced an economic boom back in the day, now sidelined as a run-down, glorified ghost town after. The project found new direction. The photos are in black and white, which casts the town and it's residents in a grim and sombre, but objective light.
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| "I wanted to tell a larger story about the moment we are in, her in America, paying attention to all that I could take in." - Richard Rothman |
“Through excessive mining, fishing, and lumbering, Crescent City had slowly depleted the base of its economy, and in his large-format portraits Rothman shows what was left behind,” explains Shaleen.
Though the photos are ripe with ironies and paradoxes of the American Dream, the story of Crescent City reminds me of that of Long Cay, Bahamas, a little cay situated just south of Crooked Island. Long Cay used to be the economic capital of the country, with a population of 2,000 (quite a bit for the island today, perhaps overpopulated by 17/1800's standards). It was the throughway, the jumping point for any ships crossing the Atlantic, en route either south to any number of ports in the Caribbean and South/Central America, or the United States. Now, Long Cay's population is nineteen, the remnants of its former inhabitants all but camouflaged with overgrowth, and the islands' cathedral (the one that served its abundant number of locals) dry-walled in half, one side nice, polished pews and alter; the other dilapidated and reminiscent of something from the History Channel's "Life Without People." (More on the History Channel having a hypothetical program about the future at some other date!)
(Reblogged from a previous page of this blog no longer in existence... poor page...)
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