From the time I arrived in Tucson nearly four years ago I have often lamented the lack of studio spaces to shoot in. To my knowledge there is not a single daylight studio actively advertising as a rentable space, in fact finding any studio at all can be a challenge, at best you might know someone who knows someone who has a semi-decent space for a backdrop and a lighting set up. Back in Seattle if you have a concept and simply need a space daylight or not, there are literally dozens of spaces available to you. There are warehouses, dance studios, multipurpose rehearsal spaces, each with their own charms or the option to simply shoot against a seamless backdrop if you’d like. On occasion it was fun to book time with a model and just play around with a locations features. I had to drive to Phoenix to find the nearest daylight studio, which has led me to shoot outside or at more site specific locations. In some ways this has been a bit of a gift, I’ve had to think outside the box and spend more time carefully crafting a concept to fit within a specific space.
At the end of August I was having this exact discussion with another photographer at the gallery I work for in Barrio Viejo when he mentioned a series of abandoned structures in Marana. I don’t know the story behind them, the buildings are small and badly damaged to the point where it’s hard to imagine them ever being anything modern. He sent me some images he’d taken and I was immediately interested, I’d been talking about a project with someone and didn’t feel like we’d totally hit on anything up to that point, when I mentioned this location it felt like we were off to the races. A week before our shoot I drove out to the location myself, not wanting to arrive there on the day of only to find that it was under surveillance, that there were people squatting there, or that in general the structures were too unsafe to shoot in. After crossing some train tracks and skirting a TEP electrical facility I came to a dirt road that I followed for a brief distance before coming to about six abandoned homes in serious disrepair.
I didn’t visit all the structures but enough to get an idea for what they were like and how safe they were. While there was more graffiti than I saw in the pictures and far more garbage, whether dumped there or pulled from the homes themselves it was definitely hazardous but with precautions it would be safe enough. Floors were giving way, roofs had caved in, one house had what looked like a hundred empty oil containers. I had to remind myself that pictures only show what you as the photographer choose to show and it was more than possible that this is what the location looked like always and it just wasn’t what the pictures show. Everything seemed safe enough, most importantly there weren’t a bunch of people squatting there that would come out and harass us for invading their space. My goal would be to get in and get out, get the best shots we could, highlight these American ruins and leave.
The day of the shoot I met Laura the model at a local Outlet mall where we took my car out to the shooting location, but as we got up to the the main frontage road that would take us to the location there was a large sign reading “Road Closed.” There was no obvious construction but we were far enough away that anything could have been occurring further on down that just wasn’t visible to us. After momentarily lamenting the loss of my familiar and simple route I remembered that a long dirt road split the structures and according to the map it ran all the way up to the next connecting East-West road. We drove around and reached the point where the road began, only to be met with a gated road that read, “Tucson Utilities private road.” We spent a couple more minutes contemplating this new turn of events until I found what appeared to be at least one more road that might connect back to this series of abandoned structures. We had to backtrack just a bit before turning down another utility road only to be met with “Dead End” “No Outlet” signs and eventually as would be the theme of the day, a padlocked gate that read “Private Property, No Access.”
Having been out to the location just one week earlier, I’d been unprepared with a backup plan, there was nothing to indicate I’d be unable to access it. Then I remembered I knew of one more abandoned structure “but I’d never actually been to it, or knew exactly how to get up to it.” I said. I’d driven past the building dozens of times and had often wondered what it was like up close but had never investigated how exactly to get there. I pulled off at the nearest turnabout to be met with a “Private Property No Trespassing.” The map appeared to show one more potential option to get there, by driving just down the road a short bit. After driving through a gated community I turned in the direction of the building when I came to, well you guessed it, a padlocked gate that read, “Private Property No Trespassing.” It was possible that we could just get out of the car and ignore the signs and hike up to the building, the internet mentioned this building but nothing noted how exactly to reach it, this led me to believe that there wasn’t a marked or legal path and that they, whoever “they” were, did not want us up there.
Now I was a a real loss. I knew of nothing else close that would work. There was Sanctuary Cove, which was a structure, but I’d never been there and it wasn’t abandoned. Nearby there was a location I’d used for shoots numerous times at the top of a utility road. The views were pretty but no structures. This was quickly turning into a desert landscape shoot just to salvage something, anything of this day. Laura was busily searching google maps for something usable. Then she pointed us in a direction, she said she saw what looked like a trail, so I drove us deeper into this gated community, with no clue what I was looking for. I made a series of turns until we saw a dirt turnoff with a gate… but unlike every other gate this one didn’t say anything. I parked and we started up the path.
If the day had been all about signs, literal or figurative I’m still not entirely sure how to take this next part. Not twenty feet from the car down the path I heard a familiar but surprising sound. It vaguely reminded me of cicadas tucked away in a tree or a bush, but this was different. It was late in the season for cicadas and it only began as we got closer, cicadas stop when you get close. Ten feet from us was a rattlesnake, shaking his tail his head snapped back in striking position. Thankfully we saw him in plenty of time and he was already on his way off the path, but it was a good reminder that this is mating season and we’re intruding on his territory. I spent the rest of the hike up on high vigilance sticking as close as possible to the middle of the path as possible, always looking down at my feet.
I don’t know if either of us knew what we were looking for, it seemed as if we were just walking as far as we could until the trail ended. When it seemed we’d reached the summit or near the summit we stopped at a large rock jutting out from the side of the mountain, a beautiful lookout at the valley beneath us and all of north Tucson. This location looked beautiful, I was not entirely keen of going off trail after our encounter with the snake. I was reaching into my bag for my camera hesitantly when I looked just a bit further up the trail and saw what appeared to be a intentional stone wall, a structure of some sort. We decided to check it out, at the absolute least I was hoping for something man-made, something vaguely close to what we’d originally envisioned for this shoot.
As I write this now a month later it still feels too impossible to actually be true, there is no way that we found what we found at the top of this trail, and yet we did. I have the actual photographic proof that what we found was real and not mere a mirage. And maybe you say “No fucking way did you not know that you would find that.” And to that… I have no answer. I had no idea, now if you believe in signs and we certainly saw a lot of them this day, then it was no mistake we were in fact led there.
Once we reached the actual summit, there was not just a rinky-dink man made structure, it was a fully abandoned house sitting atop this mountain. At least there would be something to shoot, the only question left was, what would the inside look like? My fears were that it was be as trashed and dilapidated as the homes from the original location, that it would be full of snakes seeking refuge from the sun. Instead it was shockingly clean. Well, not clean but mostly free of garbage. The house as it turns out was not a relic from a hundred years ago but instead a modern enough home to have at one point been equipped with electricity and central air. There’d been a kitchen, two beautiful fireplaces, bathrooms. With a few exceptions, mainly the demolished toilets, and the roofing missing in about a third of the living room the house was in good shape. There was nothing left that hinted at the previous inhabitants, nothing that suggested a hasty or scramble to leave. Everything that could be removed had been done so with relative care leaving just the structure standing. When people say a home has good bones this is what they mean. We did our shoot taking advantage of every space we could then headed back down both of us still in relative shock that somehow this day had worked out.
I spent plenty of time thinking about that location over the next month, how perfect it was, how wild it was to simply have found it, what all I could shoot there in the future. On numerous occasions I’d thought about how the signs had pushed us toward it, but there were coincidences too. Laura has been a location scout and had I been with just about anyone else it’s a sure bet we would not have ventured further into the neighborhood of mansions looking for a potential trail. Had Laura not been so calm during our encounter with the Rattlesnake I’d have gladly turned around and gone back to the car. A month later I returned or attempted to return to the location for another shoot only to be met with a closed gate at the street. We’d both noted at the time that it was somewhat lucky that we’d been able to simply drive on through an open gate to a “gated” community, but this seemed to be proof that everything about this shoot was meant to be. And if it’s the only time I ever get to shoot there, then I’m glad this was what I ultimately got.