Ghosts and Tiny Hands

The little hands were what caught my attention.

Jesse, Julie, Samantha; all three pressed beneath a child’s weight into the gray concrete. Alongside them the paws of the family pets; a dog and no less than one cat.

Date unknown.

The name “Jesse” stood out with the telltale sign of a mistake made, smeared away, and then re-scribed. Fingerprints from a tiny hand left to history there on a long forgotten step.

I’ve exploited the free camping in San Jon (pronounced ‘San Hone’), New Mexico for the better part of six years now. Whenever the muse takes hold to make the long burn west on I-40 we roost-up here at this small municipal park just over the border from Texas.

The south side of the park is nearly cut in half by a lingering tract of Route 66 and flanked to the west by a cluster of rundown houses standing like scabs on what was once the main vein of America. The interstate dried up the traffic and with that came the inevitable decay of business and livelihoods. San Jon is a skeleton of a once great beast. One of many corpses you’ll find littered along Route 66 from Chicago to Santa Monica. It’s the place where I shot much of the Sleepy 66 book that took me on a nighttime journey photographing Route 66 while the rest of the world slept.

During a drunken stroll the previous night I caught movement in the doorway of one of the houses. Be it a ghost of a former resident or the still-warm body of a fellow human I wasn’t certain. At any rate, I’m not one to test the odds unless the sun is still shining.

The next morning I set myself to a mission of discovery inside that house. I’ve never held much interest in photographing bandos and derelict buildings. I’m no good at it. Not to mention the fact that I have enough trouble fitting my nearly 300lb, 6'4" frame through modern doorways let alone those which are collapsing under the weight of unknown years. It’s just not congruent to the outlook of my fragile person.

But I had to know.

Was it the whiskey? The lack of sleep that comes from a racing mind after a day of racing even faster across the Great Plains? Or did I truly see a person there, or the spirit of one, standing in that doorway the night before? Seeing as I ran the real possibility of encountering questionable occupants, ghosts, even ancient desert demons, into a house presenting with all the safety of a box of scorpions, it only made sense I should take my most valuable camera along for the ride.

The Hasselblad 500 C/M, much like myself, is a bonafide legend in the world of film photography. It was by my side on a savage day in Pie Town, and has been a faithful friend through many dangers.

I had the 500 C/M loaded for bear that morning with good Kodak Portra 160. Before going into the house I knew the only course was to launch full-bore at the thing; a wide-open aperture of F/2.8 and no tighter, so a higher ISO film stock simply wouldn’t cut the mustard.

The lens picked for battle was the Zeiss Planar 80mm F/2.8 C; a piece of glass so infinitely prized that I hesitate to even mention it’s name here. And for good reason. The 80mm Zeiss F/2.8 is arguably the lens which gave the “medium format look” the “medium format look.” It’s fast (relatively), small, built like a tank, and fiendishly sharp. Mated to the 6x6 format it produces a field of view equivalent to around 44mm on a 135 (35mm) format camera. This makes it a slightly wide “normal” lens for the 500 C/M, meaning it comes close to approximating the perspective of the human eye.

Here are the handful of photos made inside that long forgotten home in San Jon. One that was once so full of color and love but left now to the savage hands of both nature and man. It’s a journey into a corner of the world you will never step and one that is only glimpsed but never truly understood.

This is the home of Jesse and Julie and Samantha and their animals and parents. They’re all likely gone now, at least from here, but that doesn’t mean they’ve altogether vanished. A part of them and their lives remains in these crumbling rooms. It’s a strange thing to be present for the ultimate end of something without witnessing the beginning. Who were these people? When did they depart this place and why did they leave so much of themselves behind?

As a requisite counterpoint I’ve included below a few more selections from that evening around San Jon just outside the home shown above. Black and white of course.

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