The Edge
We used to go out to Palm Springs a lot and hadn't been in ages. Palm Springs and the valley it sits in are at the outer edges of the Los Angeles conurbation. Whilst driving around looking at possible photo subjects I was caught up with where things began and ended. The end of town, the beginning of the desert, the last edges of where agriculture happens, where people chose to live at the edge of things, where things have been tried and not always succeeded.
So a photo project gets started. Not all the images (in fact, perhaps none) are "hang on the wall" pretty but I think they are all interesting and tell us something about the where and the when that we live in.
The Coachella valley produces a lot of fruit and vegetables from onions to salad and, as in this image grapes...Where the water ends so does the green stuff...
The water is fed into the valley via the Coachella canal...Here is one of its tributaries...
Some people end up living here too...in this case at the edge...
Remember back when Jimmy Carter told us the future of transportation (and a lot of other things) lay with jojoba oil? Like a lot of other Presidential ideas since, this one didn't work out so well...
I guess these folks left town in a hurry...
This shot was taken at Desert Center, not far from the defunct jojoba plantation...
Getting into town (or out) can be grueling...
And it's not always what you expected when you get there...
This shot is my own tribute to Ed Ruscha and his Standard Oil images...
Back to the edge of town and the now ubiquitous cell tower...
Out in the dessert some people make strange landscape choices...You can be who you want to be on the Edge...
I expect this is only the beginning of an ongoing project.
As always, thanks for looking, I hope you took something from it, and a bigger screen shows a better image.