Ludlow Cemetery
Sometime in the early 1990’s I accidentally stumbled across Ludlow cemetery, on Bagdad Chase Road in Ludlow, California, deep in the Mojave desert.
It’s a stark place, in every way: the surrounding desert (the Mojave at its glinting windswept best), the remains of the old town in decayed and broken clumps here and there around the site, the junked cars and machinery splayed across the landscape, and the wired-off rock-and-dirt plot. There’s a tiny handful of proper gravestones, with names and dates (1925 in one case) carved in them, but everyone else is anonymous, marked by sometimes-broken rough wooden crosses held together with nails or wire. A lot of rough lives and sad stories here, I’ll bet, to match the surroundings. And what’s the significance of the different-sized crosses? I hope it’s not related to the age the person when they died — there are a bunch of small crosses here….
I tried to do it justice with my old Pentax 67 medium format film camera the first time, but it was logistically difficult (involving a long drive and the use of a large tripod), and I never much liked the results. I tried it again a couple of times over the next few years, but basically forgot about it until my latest trip into the Mojave, when it came to mind while approaching Ludlow again on my way elsewhere. I found it in pretty much the same condition it was when I last saw it.
I tried to reproduce the old images that I could remember (without having seen them for a long time), but I also (of course) did new shots, and actually took them in colour this time around, using my little Nikon D800. I think the colour doesn’t help much, so I’ve made these ones monochrome again. I think the results do the place some sort of justice, and that the black-and-white is justified, but I still don’t think I’ve quite got it right.
