A sense of place: expressing meaning, instead of describing.

When photographing a particular place, we must go beyond description. We must express its meaning and give viewers a sense of what that place represents.

It is difficult to express a sense of place with only a single image. To offer a true sense of place, we need to present a number of images together as a photographic essay, a picture story or a series of sequential images. When viewers have absorbed the cumulative meaning of all of the photographs, they should be able to understand what it is that gives that place its particular identity, history, purpose and meaning.

Last year I photographed Bodie, California, the last great ghost town of the American West. More than 500 structures, some more than 125 years old, creak, bend and break in the blustery winds of the High Sierra near the California-Nevada border. Between the Civil War and World War II, while its mines pulled more than US$100 million in gold and silver from the nearby hills, Bodie developed a reputation as a dangerous town from the folks who passed through. When the mines shut down in the 1940s, though, the town withered and died.

Here is my five-picture story representing what remains of Bodie. In it, I tried to express a sense of place--a ghost town frozen in time.

The opening picture (above) is an establishing shot that defines Bodie's setting. Using the early morning light, I emphasized a sea of golden sage that still surrounds the town, just as it did in Bodie's heyday. A dusty trail leads us straight to a church, the loftiest structure in this most villainous of towns.

I try to make sure that no two shots in my picture story repeat what the other may have already conveyed. We have already seen Bodie at a distance, so the second image brings us closer to some of the structures. These battered facades speak of decay and desolation. The interplay of light and shadow on the old brick and boards provides an incongruously desolate beauty as well. It is this tension between decay and beauty that gives Bodie much of its haunting appeal.

I also wanted to express human values as part of Bodie's story. The town has been dead for a long time, and so has this old car, now little more than a shell, immobile on a field of desert grass.

I didn't just shoot the whole car, however. I made it into an abstract symbol of the past by shooting only its front end from a high vantage point, weaving the shape and color of both the car and the grass together.

This cat, Willy, greeted me from the top of a dresser in a bedroom of a long-abandoned Bodie house. I moved my vantage point to capture his reflection in the mirror behind him. He makes a perfect symbol for the place: a town of ghosts, a room of mirrors and a black cat looking back down the long tunnel of history.

When you leave Bodie, the last thing you see is a hill blanketed in sage and strewn with machinery built to extract wealth from the mines. In my final shot, I stressed the rusting machinery incongruously rising out of the desert's wild beauty and juxtaposed it with the hooded man standing on the crest of a distant hill--a lone, almost arrogant figure amidst the ruins of a once prosperous town. He becomes all of us, a metaphor for all of the imaginings we might have about a place such as this.

Philip N. Douglis, ABC, directs The Douglis Visual Workshops, entering its 34th year of training communicators in visual literacy. Douglis, an IABC Fellow, is the most widely known consultant on editorial photography for organizations. He offers his comprehensive six-person "Communicating with Pictures" workshops every May and October in Oak Creek Canyon, near Sedona, Arizona, USA. For registration information, call +1 602.493.6709 or e-mail [e-mail].