Dead Towns: Developing ideas

I discovered that I want the project to be centered around a fictional story that I create about people visiting ghost towns. I think this idea raises several questions – who would visit these random little towns in the middle of the desert? What quirks would they have as characters to motivate them to do this? What would they observe as outsiders about these ghost towns? Are there particular details that stand out?

Hopefully, I’ll be able to answer these questions in the story.

What I’ve been doing this week is finishing my impressions of the towns and picking out the photographs I might want to use for the project:



I took multiple shots of some fascinating places and it's quite hard picking the ones I'd like to display.

I also edited the original proposal and Stephanie and I had in mind to see what would be feasible for me to finish as a solo project.

Of the features of the previously proposed project, I’m going to adopt these:
1. Travelling arbitrarily to little towns (except in SoCal rather than NorCal).
2. Using 100-word snippets to match every photograph (except maybe for one last longer piece that links all the photographs together and gives a bigger picture.)
3. Using photographs to illustrate features of the ghost towns (only I’m going to use a disposable rather than a fancy analog camera that was proposed).
4. Recreating a living room space (a limited rather than entire one).

Questions I have: What section of a living room space should I use? What furniture should I buy? What would most effectively showcase my project? I'll figure these out soon.

Dead Towns: Lots of uncertainty

So the project begins…on a poor note. The very night Stephanie and I were supposed to embark on our road trip to take photographs and write notes on Northern Californian ghost towns, Stephanie had personal problems and had to back out.

As someone who cannot drive, had no way of getting north during winter break, and had no other time to head north aside from winter break, it looked like I had to seriously modify the project. I booked a plane to San Diego the next week where a friend offered to drive me around – albeit for only a shorter time period. There, I took photographs using disposable cameras, took as many notes as I could, and decided to reconstruct a project from what was salvageable from the old one.

Right now, I’m in the process of recreating my memories of SoCal small towns and writing them into paragraphs. Here are some images from my notebook:




In the following weeks, I plan to edit the scope of the project. Originally, we were supposed to recreate a living room with objects and impressions from Northern California. As I don’t think I can do that alone, I might recreate part of a living room from Southern California as described to me by my friend. I might also take the project in a more fictional or symbolic direction and not be bogged down by realism. I guess everything is up in the air.