The Best Choice

In "The Best Choice" series, I embark on an exploration of place as metaphor. Taken in the dead of night, the photographs in the series are long exposures that play with time, space, and light.

We explored the building over the course of a winter, sometimes in feet of snow, taking photographs and salvaging items from the decay. In one of the motels deepest, darkest rooms, among the ceiling tiles, luggage stands, paint cans, cheesy hotel art prints of trapeze artists, mattresses, and the filth that covered everything, I came upon treasure:

one moldy package of long expired paper.

I brought it back and tested it in the darkroom, and amazingly, it worked! I am printing the photographs on this paper, embracing the distortions that come from the mold and age. Each print is one shot and one of a kind; due to the distortions, no two can ever be the same. I am not using test strips, just making educated guesses on exposure times.

With a quiet reverence, we observed the place deteriorating, not only by the flooding and decay, but through the damaged caused by its human visitors. People come in and senselessly smash furniture and windows; nature, on the other hand, slowly reclaims the space. Vines slowly overtake the grounds and creep in through broken windows, and mold slowly eats.

In addition to the destruction, I also found it to be a place of great beauty – the floor-to-ceiling windows in the dining hall, its brightly colored carpets, its large wooden dance floor. With the right ear, the water flowing through the basement and under the dance floor sounds like a small stream in the forest. Mushrooms begin to grow out of the floorboards.

The Best Choice sits right on the west coast's pulsing main artery of capitalism: Interstate 5. Sound is drowned out by its constant dull roar. It sits in juxtaposition to the quiet emptiness of the abandoned building. A once bustling motel, restaurant, and event space is now only visited by animals, junkies looking for a place to slam or sleep, and the occasional delinquent teenager. Spending time there, I find myself ruminating on the "American Dream," waste, our consumerist society, social stratification, and the place of humanity in the world. Is all of our modern convenience really worth the social and environmental suffering that our systems are built upon? What fulfillment do we really get from our endless array of "choices," and at what cost? Is the subsiding of our modern age and the reclamation of the world by nature the best choice? Where do we go from here?