You drive until your eyes glaze over, and when you’ve reached your limit and cannot bear to drive one mile more, the Salton Sea suddenly appears; flat, enormous, and shimmering salt and strange light. It’s unrecognizable as water, and so you don’t see it at first (it blends with the sky), and then, you do. As you get closer, you realize the smell arrived way before your recognition of the shore, full of salt and sulfur mingled with something older, something that smells well.., geological, like the earth itself is exhaling.
This is the Salton Sea, and somewhere along its crumbling southern edge, half-swallowed by rising salt flats and sinking slowly into the desert floor, is Bombay Beach.
The slow retreat of the waterline left behind a shoreline of fish bones, barnacled debris, and a profound, ominous silence.
Built in the mid-20th century as a modest resort community when the Salton Sea was California’s unlikely inland paradise, speedboats, celebrity visitors, the quintessential California dream, Bombay Beach peaked quietly and then declined dramatically. Floods in the 1970s. Salinization. The slow retreat of the waterline, all left behind a shoreline of fish bones, barnacled debris, and a profound, ominous silence.
Most people fled. A few hundred stayed.
And then, sometime in the last decade, the artists arrived.
The dream continues scattered throughout the town in and around abandoned lots and crumbling buildings
What they found there and what they made of it defies easy description. Bombay Beach is a backdrop that creates a unique gallery space, a place to experience and become a part of the various art pieces and installations that water and land into one concept. It has no hours, no admission, and no gift shop. It is an open-air fever dream spread across the unpleasant silt coastline, or crusty shoreline depending on the weather, by a sea so poisoned it cannot support life. The dream continues scattered throughout the town in and around abandoned lots and crumbling buildings. It’s a place where rusted school buses have been transformed into shrines, where neon signs glow inexplicably in the middle of nowhere, advertising nothing.
You walk toward the water and stumble upon a circle of old televisions, their screens dark, their faces turned toward the sea
And the installations don’t announce themselves; they are sudden. You turn a corner on a dust-blown street and find a chandelier hanging from a dead tree, its crystals catching the late-afternoon light like something that materialized from another century. You walk toward the water and stumble upon a circle of old televisions, their screens dark, their faces turned toward the sea as if watching for something just below the surface.
There is a quality to the light here that photographers spend careers chasing, flat and brutal at noon, then golden and impossibly gentle at dusk, when the mountains on the far shore turn violet and the water goes the color of old copper. The art seems to know this. It is made for this light. It exists in conversation with a landscape that is itself a kind of artwork: vast, strange, indifferent, and heartbreaking in equal measure.
They are interested in ruin itself, in what it means to make something in a place the world has already given up on.
The beauty of Bombay Beach is inseparable from its decay. That is the point. The artists who come here, some passing through, some who have stayed and built lives in the wreckage, are not interested in prettifying ruin. They are interested in ruin itself, in what it means to make something in a place the world has already given up on.
There is defiance in it. There is also tenderness.
My photographs are brief glimpses of both the retreating poisoned sea and the art that fills its void. They are an attempt to capture a visual of an uncommon perspective, a time and place in the present that speaks of beauty, ugliness, the consequences, and a possible dystopian future.
Bombay Beach should not exist. The sea is dead, the ground is sinking, and the population could fit inside a single city bus. But here it is anyway, bizarre, salt-crusted, and dangerous. Stubbornly, defiantly alive. Salt and strange light. The world moved on, but the search for meaning and the creative spirit remain.
An end and a beginning.
Virtual world Artist and author since 2008. Owner of 19 in Second Life