D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
October
2008
 |
|
In two new exhibits, Silver City photographer Dennis Weller documents downtown and ghost towns.
By Richard Mahler
Old and abandoned buildings. New Mexico is full of 'em. Take a drive in any direction and there they are, beacons of bygone eras. Dozens of adobe homes, plaster fallen and bricks melting, dot pastures reclaimed by weeds. Mountain mining shacks, tin roofs torn by wind and bent by snow, cling precariously to hillsides. Frame ranch houses, broken windows used by bats and swallows, collapse one board at a time. Their stories, like the people who once were sheltered by them, are fading into distant memory.
Dennis Weller's panoramic photos of downtown Silver City will be on view at the Silver City Museum.
|
But at least one man is taking careful notice.
"I like to travel among abandoned spaces around here," confesses Dennis Weller, a Silver City photographer with two new exhibitions this month. "I've been taking pictures of old buildings and interiors for about 15 or 20 years now."
For a dozen of those years Weller has lived and worked in a split-level brick house on Yankie Street, built in 1904 by brothers Van and Richard Manville. Prior to the photographer's purchase, it was occupied by a judge who installed beautiful hardwood flooring rescued from one of the infamous Madame Millie's Hudson Street brothels. Weller subsequently acquired one of Millie's rocking chairs, and has remodeled the home's interior to include a darkroom and private gallery. The Territorial-style duplex, with its distinctive shed roof and staggered parapet, is barely visible in a century-old panoramic photograph that came with the house when Weller bought it.
"You have to look very hard to find it," says Weller, dusting off the framed print, "but this is one of the only photos I know of that includes my house."
It is also one of the inspirations for a project displayed at the Silver City Museum beginning Oct. 10, in which 34 color panoramas document each and every block of Bullard and Broadway. The photographer used an eight-megapixel digital camera and a computer-based process that stitches several separate images into a single long picture. Between three and five photos were combined seamlessly by a software program inside Weller's Hewlett-Packard computer.
"I set my camera on a tripod across the street and carefully panned as I shot," explains Weller, a soft-spoken man with crystalline blue eyes and a medium build. "You have to overlap them by a considerable amount so that the computer can align the final, single image for you." As recently as three years ago, he notes, such software yielded imperfect results: "But it's advanced to the point where I can't tell where one image starts and another begins. It's magic." Before such technology became available, photographers used special lenses, film and techniques to create such panoramic shots.
"It was very impractical," says Weller. "You had to have a very expensive, special-purpose camera and then you had great difficulty in the darkroom developing these images."
Modest and casual in his dress and manner, Weller does not mention the precise measurements such photography requires even today, nor his commitment to getting up before dawn over a series of weeks in order to capture deserted downtown blocks at sunrise. Only a few blocks could be documented in each session, given the fast-changing light conditions and traffic congestion. The result is a remarkably comprehensive series that documents Silver City's historic business district in an understated, artful way. The pictures have an almost haunting, still-life quality, the colors of buildings vibrant against a washed-out sky. Weller hesitates to label them "artsy," leaving others to judge.
"There is a conceptual aspect to Dennis' panoramas that I think is very unusual," says Ann Lowe, a graphic artist who printed the photographs on the museum's 44-inch-wide inkjet printer. "The lighting is interesting, for example, because the photos were taken very early in the morning and the interiors of the buildings are sometimes illuminated" by the near-horizontal rays of the rising sun. "You can see right inside the rooms of a few of these businesses."
Using Adobe's Photoshop program, she layered Weller's photographs into high-resolution files, printing the images three abreast on a long roll of semi-gloss paper. The photographer then mounted, matted and framed them himself, as he does all of his work.
"I also personally print all of my images in my own darkroom," says Weller, who measures his words carefully and presents them without embellishment. A sense of pride, however, seeps into his descriptions of recent work: "They're something different," he allows. "I got some unusual perspectives."
Because the panoramic scenes combine several photos and were taken through a relatively wide lens, they provide a view impossible to duplicate in real life. A person would have to step back 200 yards or so to scan these city blocks in the same way — a vista prevented by buildings on the opposite sides of each street.
"You get this interesting isolation," says Weller of his panoramas, which have no human figures and very few cars. "If I am around in 10 or 20 years, I may take another set, just to see how things have changed."
The Silver City Museum show was scheduled after Weller showed up with a complete set of the 34 prints, donated to the facility's archives. And while there are plenty of historic pictures of downtown streets, the museum's collection holds nothing like this; most are angled shots showing such events as parades, floods and political rallies.
"I really think of my pictures of being of more value in 50 or 100 years," says Weller, "when people may wonder what Bullard and Broadway looked like back in 2008." He points out that the resolution of his photos is so high that even some of the posters in downtown windows are legible, "which might interest someone doing research in the future."
Unlike Silver City, most of the communities where Weller takes pictures — Mogollon, Old Hachita, Fierro and Yeso among them — are nearly uninhabited, their heydays long past. What they have in common are physical reminders of fortunes lost and dreams unrealized. These are a focus of Weller's other new exhibition, opening Oct. 3 at the Mimbres Region Arts Council Gallery in Silver City's Wells Fargo Bank building.
"My preferred subject matter is black-and-white imagery of simple interiors," he explains. "Since moving to New Mexico 12 years ago, I have concentrated on abandoned buildings found in the many ghost towns of the Southwest."
Exquisitely printed and presented, Weller's silver-gelatin photographs capture moments of time in the slow decline of a structure's life. Details are revealed amid light and shadow: fabric falling off a vestibule wall, a tumbleweed stuck inside a doorway, paint peeling from a window frame, a shaft of filtered light illuminating a Victorian-era chair. The pictures may seem simple at first glance, but closer inspection betrays their careful composition.
"I am essentially self-taught," says Weller, who retired in the 1990s from a career as a research psychologist at a US Navy base in Orlando. "I started exploring this part of the country three years before I moved. I went through Arizona and Colorado as well as New Mexico. I finally picked this place. Part of the attraction was the wilderness, because I hike a lot. But there were the photographic possibilities, too, with the ghost towns and the [quality of] light."
Weller laments that "there aren't many old buildings in Florida. They tend to knock 'em over to put up housing developments and shopping malls. I had to come here to find good old structures." In Orlando, he observes, "you have no sense of the past at all. Everything has been built since Disney arrived."
Weller's own skills as a builder encompass the construction of miniature structures, sometimes adorned with tiny hardwood floors, walls, doors and doll furniture, that he lights and shoots in black-and-white. These clean, minimalist images contrast with the decaying household furnishings and collapsing ceilings of many of his ghost town pictures.
"I take pictures out in the wilderness, too," Weller says. "I've done some scenics," including a few panoramas. "But I've had my interest in interior spaces for a long time."
For many years, even in Florida, Weller displayed and sold his photographs at dozens of outdoor art shows. He continues to do so on a limited basis, returning to display at a few Sunshine State venues each year. "Selling my photos is not a big moneymaker for me," he acknowledges with a laugh. "Not that I haven't tried."
While Weller has shown in various galleries over the years, he is currently unrepresented. Those interested can view his work at his home studio by appointment.
Obviously, this photography isn't undertaken for the specific purpose of commercial success. "Dennis is a real artist's artist," points out one prominent member of the Silver City arts community. "He is very exacting in meeting his own high standards, his own vision as it were." Another artistic colleague, a watercolorist, praises Weller for his commitment to an art form that seems to be dying in the digital age: dogged pursuit of black-and-white photography with traditional materials and methods, including the use of archival-quality processing and rag-based papers. "It's getting harder and harder to find photographers who do what Dennis Weller does," the admiring painter sighs, "and who do it so well."
Dennis Weller's panoramic photos will be on view at the Silver City Museum, 312 W. Broadway, beginning Oct. 10 with a 7-9 p.m. reception, as part of the 12th annual Weekend at the Galleries (see this issue's Arts Exposure section). For more information, call 538-5921 or visit www.silvercitymuseum.org His black-and-white photos will be on exhibit for six weeks at the Mimbres Region Arts Council Gallery in the Wells Fargo Bank building, 1201 Pope St. The show opens Oct. 3 with a reception at 5:30 p.m. For more information, call 538-2505 or see www.mimbresarts.org
Southwest Storylines columnist Richard Mahler is the author of 11 books, including The Jaguar's Shadow: Searching for a Mythic Cat, to be published by Yale University Press in 2009. His byline has appeared in publications including New Mexico Magazine, Santa Fean, Los Angeles Times and Arizona Highways, and on columns for the Albuquerque Journal and Crosswinds. He lives in Silver City.