History
For a place so arid and so empty, so hot and so cold, so ragged and so beautiful, there is rich history near Gallup. Standing at the top of a mesa near an archeological site on Ft. Wingate, the igloos that (at two seperate times) housed the most munitions in the world lay out in formation. Standing here thinking of the old Army Depot and how it will soon fade into history, I feel an odd sense of loss. I can feel the hundreds of lives that worked and lived on this base. Lives of happiness, depression, anger, elation, hope. Mixing with those lives is a realization that others had lived here before, a fact that shouts loudly from the ground and it’s pottery shard flecked surface at my feet. And behind all of this in the photo, timeless geological formations of the Pyramid and Church Rock look on.
Fairly simple and delivered in black and white to eliminate distractions, I love the many themes in this photo. Find your meaning.
This picture seems almost otherworldly. The ruins in the foreground and the scrub around it looks very much like New Mexico but the Pyramid and the buildings in the distance look almost like they belong in Egypt somewhere with the field in between looking like a field of hay with new bails lined up in rows. It’s a busy picture that doesn’t feel too busy. It feels like the bridge between three worlds.
I love pictures of ruins but they are so photogenic that it’s hard to find a shot that is not cliche or overdone. I like how this one combines other elements to show the passage of time. I especially like the jumble of fallen stone in front of the wall, a metaphor for the fallen civilization that lived there so many years ago.