Category: Triangle of fire

Bunker, July 2009

I’ve been neglecting Camp Hayden, a old coastal defense installation near the house, an alder-veiled network of subterrainian bunkers atop the worn basalt bluffs over Crescent Bay and Tongue Point. Most mornings are foggy and the Strait is obscured by a thick carpet of fog, so I’m not sure how much practical appliaction the fort had in its day, but it is a fun place to haunt as the sun starts to light up the fog. Much newer than Fort Worden, it nevertheless has eased into obscurity and earthly reclaimation much more vigourously. There is more of a post-people dynamic here, belied by the constant stream of RVs and popup trailers that  frequent the campgrounds below.

Ah, on a clear day you could shell Canada…

Stoddard Commons, June 2009

While setting up this shot a passing fellow asked if I was trying to reproduce the look of the installation when it was first built, seeing as I was using an ‘antique’ camera from roughly the same era. I hate to lecture the pedestrians, so I said yes, but I’d have to add the orignal paint back in photoshop. [/rimshot]

Benson Complex, June 2009

Long day… After all the Rorschach paint blots I finally started seeing virgin marys in the efflorescence and calcium stains.

Benson Complex, June 2009

The painter I’ve been tracking seems to have taken to simply throwing cups of paint. I like the look- almost like some vintage ghost did a Wile E Coyote right smack into the steel door.

Mortar Complex, June 2009

We went back to Fort Worden yesterday, this time to the gun line proper on Artillery Hill. The first thing that jumps out is the random application of paint samples around the grounds- perhaps a minor municipal gesture against the overwhelming rust, or maybe it’s just official modesty over obscene grafitti. Nevertheles, the place is fascinating, a small stateside Angkor Wat slowly being reclaimed by nature and some guy with a paint roller.

Battery Stoddard Complex, May 2009

The rest of the shots from Thursday evening, in no particular order. The vertical shot of the doorway I cropped on the bottom due to a shadow racing across the sidewalk and threatening to start up the building. I was in a hurry and was trying to collapse the tripod legs to get lower in the vertical space, which is a litle difficult with the camera mounted in vertical orientation- sort of top heavy. A tripod leg shot out and I shouted a mild Jesus! just as a jogger was passing by and she glared and muttered Perv. Perhaps thinking I still had time during my minor disaster to ogle her. Some people are so self absorbed, lol.

Battery Underground, May 2009

I went back to Fort Worden after work on Thursday. Our crew was working in Irondale this week, just up the hill from the old steel mill site, and I drove to work myself that day to give myself a break from the regimented inmate aspects of the group commute/caravan.  Plus, it’s the only way I can take all my camera gear with me. I left work in a sort of Friday evening daze- Thursday is my Friday, we work 4/10 hr days- not entirely sure what to do with myself.

Irondale segues to Port Hadlock and then to Port Townsend in a crescendo of affluenza. It would be very funny to see it in time elapse- see someone emerge from the crawlspace under a beat-to-hell trailer and end up walking around some of the palatial Victorian mansions in PT, but instead I just reflexively ended up at Fort Worden. Something about the place on a gorgeous spring evening- the white of the clapboards and the gray slate of the rooftops and the sweeping green of the commons- like a place where parades go to die.

The Stoddard artillery battery is quite inconspicuous off the end of the grounds, low and oddly small atop the eastern bluffs over Admiralty Inlet. It gives off an bruised glow in the growing dusk, it’s the perfect time to set up and take some shots. A natural symbiosis of desertion and flagging museum budgets.

These Ft Worden shots are a minor scope creep from original project, but I’m realizing that I have to connect themes as I uncover them in awkward ways to keep myself involved in my own projects.  No doubt eveything will eventually come up crisscrossed and confused by a network of aesthetic escape routes. But I do want  to involve more history. And this theme of abandonment does keep cropping up.