This Bad Land is a view on a distinct geography. Mostly we know the eroded sod tables of the Badlands National Park in South Dakota, but there is a large varied collection of American badlands, all of which are also preserved in parks and reserves. Even Badlands National Park itself has a much broader collection of terrain, most of it, barren of visitors. THIS BAD LAND is a collection of fifteen distinct badland regions in ten different states.
A useless beauty, this naturally wasted landscape has no resources on its surface freeing it from development pressure and use-value and optimizing it as a reserve for, basically, human freedom and visuals. When humans have bothered to enter the badlands it’s always a visit to look and see, its only real use.
For obvious reasons badlands are not the place to be for most two-leggeds and even the four-leggeds. It’s flyover, or burrow-into country for most of the inhabitants, except the lion and buffalo, particularly on the big sod tables of the South Dakota badlands. Surface life is rare and specialized like the pygmy rattlesnakes i ran into in Fanatasy Canyon, and, particularly, the bristlecone pines. At Cedar Breaks and Bryce Canyon where, the badlands are high enough, and the most devoid of flora, you can find the oldest life on earth. Taking root in a place not even mold and fungus can live, and by growing very slowly, the oldest living bristlecones survive for 5,000 years, in the dry and cold and above the tree line, where harshness and isolation are the terms to live longer than anything on earth.
Generally the badlands are not kind to life, and, barring a quest for distraction/distortion, we avoid them. The naturally bad place is home to no one. A no good place that people only wanted to get through, go around or hide in, means there’s hardly any human history to narrate.
Before modern tourists people entered the badlands to secrete, hole-up or find something within through the vision quest. It’s easy to see why the Outlaw Trail coursed through the badlands of many states, or why the ghost dancers chose the Stronghold
Table, today in the South Unit of Badlands National Park, to safely worship, or why, since the ancients, this has been prime vision quest land. They are now protected for the purpose of public viewing, where a vision awaits. If chosen, this is the place for real seclusion and spiritual connection, along with simpler forms of visual enhancement like photography. And whether it’s tourism or a more serious respite involving a more inexplicable connection, the badlands are always being used for visual experience, where you can go as deep as you care into the terrain.
For the more objectively minded visitor there’s, of course, photography, as well as, plenty of geologic history in the naked earth of the badlands which often lies in exposed cretaceous zones (the age when dinosaurs died) adding to the sense of lost time. Fossils can even be found exposed on the surface of the swiftly eroding badlands.
This sublime geography is a result of profuse erosion that can produce fantastic formations, the most characteristic of which is the “hoodoo” – the familiar cap rock on a stem (toadstool) that often stands with grotesque splendor, it’s fate (collapse) imminent. The presence of badlands is also signified by an array of knobs, paddles, fins, helmets and holes, plus numerous incomparable shapes, which can only be tagged as original, random and evolving. And all these objects are encompassed in larger denditriic networks of erosion falling off tables and plateaus into gullies, coolies and washes.
Our natural landmarks have been thoroughly documented often by exploring the vastness, size and scale of the land, particularly in the west. THIS BAD LAND ignores scale by looking at shape as it occurs in the more godforsaken zones. Erosion is the theme. The emptiness of what’s been washed and blown away is fixed on the land. Time is visible in the strata and layers exposed by erosion and can be read as a record of earth in this area in different epochs.
It’s a fateful landscape imprinted with the chaotic face of weather over time. In geologic terms, things happen swiftly in the badlands as the soft rock, clays and muds wash away leaving unintended landmarks both fleeting and repetitive as temporary testament to the random indifference of natural phenomenon.
One distinction for this book is that it was shot “in the dark.” Although I didn’t completely reject the use of direct sunlight, the pictures were made primarily at night. Yet the terrain is entirely lit. I keyed into the sculptural qualities of these zones with moonlight as an ally. This operation was accomplished by an extreme time exposure technique using purely moonlight to illuminate the accidental art of erosion at work in the badlands. It also deepened significantly the chances you would not encounter humans in a place at its kindest says, “Keep moving.”
Shooting through the night in already desolate zones, greatly enhances freedom to concentrate on seeking what the moon has made visible, and, in the few places that are already popular tourist zones, shooting at night is absolutely necessary and very successful.Shooting with the reflected sunlight of the moon is a reverse of the old day-for-night trick in cinema – shooting night for day, with a moon as an aie. The unearthly light source is rare; occurring three nights per month if skies are clear, but so is its object. Shot on Ektar 25 negative film between 1994 and 2002, it’s far easier to do today with digital cameras. There are differences between the formats, although they both get the job done. Film, is far more demanding in many ways, particularly with regards to much longer exposures, some reaching two hours. Regardless, any movement of the camera ruins the shot. Moisture can fog a lens within 15 minutes. I could crack my skull or break an ankle, too.
Constantly stringing out three different cameras on tripods, meant i never stood around guarding exposures. What from? Always on the move, scouting, planting cameras and retrieving them, the danger was losing a camera out in the wilderness, or, having to come back in daylight to find it, or, i never thought about it, falling off heights, in the last place on earth…
Slowly lit by a cool radiance, the earth spins and allows the light source one hour of moving exposure. Time is injected into the still, usually around ninety minutes worth. The negative’s exposure becomes more a bloom as light slowly exposes and saturates the film. We see a lit night sky, the ink blue of the stratosphere and light trails left by stars as the camera and earth rotate. The unusually keyed topography appears maybe too real, and seemingly polarized.It’s a nocturnal search for geological wonders of the most elemental sort. It’s a quest for literally the material of visions – dirt and rock aged into figures that objectify a dream landscape.
After a hundred silent nights of moonlit badlands, I ask, what’s good about this bad land?
It’s place for the soul through the eyes because it’s good for nothing but looking. The badlands bring out the real earth and make the case for distortion. And the badlands are for the eyes.
There is of course, nothing new under the sun, but what about the moon?
The badlands remind us that this is what a more normal planet looks like. Abundant life in our solar system is a rare thing, and, thus, maybe odd. Perhaps this moonlit riot of dirt reminds us, most importantly, we have phenomenal temporary luck in a sublime universe.
A photographer might like to think the landscape, and I know the landscape thinks me, and i let it. Ruins are not only man’s invention. The grotesque begins as plain. Erosion is distinction, weather is fate and eventually erosion wins – a few things i learned.
Does a land with no purpose make you the destination? Nothingness remains the best invitation to fate and destiny. In the chaos and randomness of natural wastelands we can sharpen definition, clarity and purpose, as individuals, for eventual return, back into a realm of our own making.
Read more about being inside the Pictures Quest, but, first, check the book, VIEW the slideshow and return.
The 15 bad land sites depicted are edited in alphabetical order. The sites are located within these named areas: Bisti, Bryce, Cainveville, Cathedral Gorge, Cathedral Valley, Cedar Breaks, Chimney Bluffs, De-Na-Zin, Fantasy Canyon, Goblin Valley, Hell’s Half Acre, Makoshika, Mono Lake, Badlands, & Zion. This Bad Land is a certified Going Under project, and a Pictures’ Quest.