I just finished reading The Road, the Pulitzer Prize winning, post-apocalyptic novel by Cormac McCarthy (who also wrote No Country for Old Men). Its as dark a tale as you can imagine: a father and son, maybe 10 years after an all out, global nuclear war, travel along a road, trying to get to warmer climes, while evading marauding gangs. Food is the most valuable and the most scarce resource - nothing grows anymore, and so the very few people remaining are hunted as food. And everything everywhere is grey from the ashes, which continue to linger in the air. There is no color anywhere, and the sun has not been seen since the war. They go from one devastated, abandoned city to the next. The descriptions are constant and they remind me of course of one thing: the places I’m drawn to and that I photograph.

Part of my fascination with ruins and decay and dark foreboding places is my fear and obsession with a post-apocalyptic world - which I’ve had since my early teens. I connect with a scene if it has an aching hollowness; if it conjures up a sadness for what we do, and for things to come; the depiction of a possible grim future; a scene where people no longer exist, except in random bits of evidence. Its a bleak future created by little boys with power, throwing stones in the shape of ICBM’s.

But then I can’t accept this, and I have to turn the scene inside out, glorifying what we have, and making monuments from these desolate places. In the end I celebrate life and I throw rainbows at the scene, and this makes me happy. Its an odd form of propulsion.

I’ve discussed other aspects of all this in two previous posts, appropriately named The Apocalypse, and The Apocalypse, part 2 

Here’s a very non-apocalyptic scene. “Friends” (1985, Cape Cod)