Author: Mark

The past several photos I shared from the old swamp full of abandoned vehicles, near the Fort Ransom County farm in North Dakota had a few things in common, they were mostly whole. The remains of this car is not the case and has certainly “Gone to Pieces.” The tall grass definitely takes up a majority of the photo, with only parts of the vehicle sticking out from below. They are truly nested and over grown within the grass, creating a stark contrast in textures.

The second vehicle in the background hints to how it could have appeared before. I photographed everything with a tripod, 100 ISO black & white film and f22, because I wanted to capture every detail clearly, from the background to every blade of grass.
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This photograph captured at the abandoned Fort Ransom County farm continued my study of the swamp of abandoned vehicles behind the farm. The unusual perspective of the dashboard “Behind the Wheel” of this old Chrysler minus the interior roof and door created a vision of this out-of-place view of their expected norms.

The challenge of this shot was to capture most of the dark place beneath the dashboard, while maintaining the detail but not blow out the light colored tall grass behind it. I learned early on, especially with shooting film, the value of bracketing photos with slight changes in camera settings in order to find the one shot that lights the subjects perfectly.
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This particular photograph is by far my favorite of all the photos I captured at the abandoned Fort Ransom County,  North Dakota farm. This old classic car left empty and abandoned truly epitomizes all the vehicles I found there, buried in the tall grass like a relic from a time long past.

The smooth black metal created a high contrast to the rough, faded grass surrounding this old car. Apart from the physical details of the image, it also seems to tell a story and sparks the imagination like most classic cars do. What did the car look like when it was new? Was it some young person’s first car?

This photo always reminded me of the Stephen King movie “Christine” about a demon-possessed car that look much like this one. To me, there was always some sort of eerie and haunting sense about this photograph that continues to instilled a curiosity, even 25 years later. Some photographs can really stick with you years later, and this one does with me.
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A good distance behind the abandoned Fort Ransom County farm I discovered in North Dakota, I found a somewhat mysterious collection of abandoned vehicles in a swamp. The cars were is various degrees of being catabolized for parts and buried in the North Dakota tall grass.

Some of my favorite photos from this farm are from this area. I always found this discovery stunning and apocalyptic. “At a Dash” captures this dashboard of an old Chrysler surrounded by the light shaded dried grass of the field and swamp area. There was almost a haunted nature to this area and I tried to capture that aspect on my black & white film.
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Before North Dakota I really only took pretty straight forward, simple tourist type photographs with my 35mm film camera. Occasionally, I’d shoot people, like family on a vacation or something like that. I did go through a period of photographing foreign and exotic sports cars on the street in St.Louis in the mid 1980’s when I was in high school. However, this was very far removed from those days.

These relics of an age long past were fossils of steel and glass, and instinctively I thought it important to capture them where they lay. In the big sky sun resting in the tall grass, there was a tranquil silence to them. There were other vehicles I captured in their final position, but this “Sleeping Giant” was the first. The motorized workhorse now at peace.
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