Randsburg, 2026
The first time I visited Randsburg, a former gold mining town on the edge of Death Valley, was completely by accident. It was one of those moments where you feel like you have discovered something no one else knows about. Despite the ‘Silent Hill’ feeling of the place (a video game made into a film about a haunted mining town), even in the middle of the day, I made a few reference snaps and planned to come back at some point.
Randsburg is almost like an abandoned ghost town with its dilapidated buildings and old mines with holes ready for you to fall into, but people still live here making the most of the deserts freedoms, albeit at the price of being cooked alive in the desert heat.
My plan was to return late in the day, before dark due to the mine shafts everywhere, and get a shot I had already taken in the mid day sun six months before. From the onset, the entire day felt like a chore. There was no sense of discovery, and the final image, although precisely what I was after, left me cold. It was a realization of why photographers tend to amass an amazing body of work only to move on to something else entirely. But then I remembered the wise old words of a gallery rep, “When people see the work, they see it for the first time.” For the viewer, it is like the day the photographer first discovered a place, the thrill of it, the mystery, the amazement. Well, that’s what I would like to think..
