GREAT GHOST TOWNS OF THE WEST, photographs by Tom Till and essay by Teresa Jordan, Graphic Arts Center Publishing, $30, hardback, 128 pages.
After my high school senior year, I traveled the West photographing ghost towns with my good friend, Tim.
With 4-inch-by-5-inch cameras and a Volkswagen van doubling as a darkroom, Tim and I shot every rundown location we could find in Arizona, Utah, Wyoming and Montana. The more decrepit and filthy the place was, the more we liked it — our goal being to produce a series of black and white photographs that looked, at least to us, like real ghost towns.
In the newly published "Great Ghost Towns of the West," with photos by Tom Till and text by Teresa Jordan, you won't find anything remotely decrepit or filthy. In fact, Till's color photographs of the dead and dying locales are so beautiful you will wonder why somebody doesn't move back.
The communities Till photographs and Jordan writes about were once thriving farm towns, mining towns or logging towns. Now abandoned, each has a story that Jordan tells with flair.
Here's an example:
"The car was big and old, turquoise with lots of chrome and confident fins. It stopped, the doors opened, and then very slowly an elderly couple began to extricate themselves. I went over and introduced myself. 'I saw Buffalo on the map,' I told them. 'I just wanted to see what was here.'
" 'Not much anymore,' the man told me with a hint of an accent. 'It's just a ghost town.'
"His wife chuckled and added, 'We're the only ghosts left in town.'
"They introduced themselves as the Flugges (rhymes with 'boogies') and invited me home for lemonade."
The book is full of rich, descriptive writing that educates while it entertains.
Till, one of the West's most published photographers, is in rare form in "Ghost Towns." Each photograph is crisp, colorful and brimming with stunning images of nature and the remnants of long-past communities.
His 4x5 camera records such interesting detail that you will actually be able to study the grain on wood, the rust on metal, the veins of leaves and more.
"What is it about ghost towns that so intrigues us?" Jordan asks in the book's beginning. "What draws us to abandonment and ruin, a sense of things left behind? Why are we so fascinated by ghosts?"
This book, which is exquisitely printed and well-bound, answers Jordan's questions with style and substance.
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