Gallery: The Desert Towns That Wrote the Histories of Nukes and Race Cars
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With designed and graphic compositions, Osborne’s photographs in the barren landscape make some modern day land speed activities look like lunar expeditions.
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Osborne wanted to address the landscape's place in our collective consciousness. “The list of movies that have featured Wendover's otherworldly surroundings is long, fascinating, and often apocalyptic,” he says.
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“The casinos called themselves resorts, and people resorted to them. Many came by car and truck and tour bus. On Fridays, the parking lots were full. They also arrived on daily planes. Shuttles waited by the tarmac to convey them onward,” writes Osborne in his artist statement.
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Osborne first passed through the area -- Western Utah, Eastern Nevada -- in the late-90's, while driving from Texas to California for college. He always planned to return with his camera.
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Wendover, Utah was established in 1908 as a stop on the Western Pacific Railroad.
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“A number of excellent contemporary landscape photographers have shot in and around Wendover including Richard Misrach, Mark Ruwedel, William Wylie, Mark Klett, Vicky Sambunaris, and Trevor Paglen," says Osborne of his influences.
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100 years ago, Teddy Tetzlaff clocked 142.8 MPH on the Bonneville Salt Flats, laying down the first U.S. land speed record. Since 1914, thousands more speed-freak feats have been made upon those 99 million cubic yards of salt.
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"Some of the pictures were shot in relatively straightforward fashion, where others involved a fair amount of artifice—unusually long lenses, lights and so on," says Osborne.
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Independence Day, Tree Of Life, and Cremaster Cycle (II) are some of the dozens of films made in and around Wendover, UT and West Wendover, NV.
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The population of Wendover, UT has shrunk to 1,500. Meanwhile, West Wendover has grown in recent decades to 4,500 people.
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With desert truck stops, Interstate off-ramps, classified military operations, environmental compromise, casinos and world record attempts Osborne’s photography is as American as it comes.
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The Enola Gay crew dropped early prototypes of Little Boy and Fat Man—the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—on the Great Basin Desert.
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Since the closure of the Wendover Army Airfield military base, Wendover and West Wendover forged out new economic incomes and now rely heavily on the jobs and tax base provided by the gaming industry.
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“In their hearts, machines were lined up in rows,” says Osborne of the casinos. “Their screens glowed and they emitted the sounds of clinking coins and electronic arpeggios. The sounds proved the machines were working. Money was being made, life sustained.”
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Keeping him grounded and while working on Floating Island, Osborne read non-fiction essays by David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, George Saunders and John D’Agata.
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"The destinations," says Osborne, "are vast hotels tethered to cavernous halls with mirrored walls and ceilings that double their dimensions."
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“My work is fairly promiscuous with regard to genre and geography,” says Osborne. “My projects tend to revolve around place but I don't really consider myself a landscape photographer."
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15,000 years ago, the area that Osborne photographed was below a thousand foot deep Pleistocene lake.
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Floating Island, published by Daylight Books, is Mike Osborne’s first book.
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“Historic casino names,” explains Osborne, “like Silver Smith, Stateline, Goldrush gave way to new names – Nugget, Rainbow, Montego Bay. After dark, the words radiated promise. Their light traveled across the desert for miles in search of a surface to describe.”
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The book, Floating Island, ends with a series of hotel interiors which embody the maddening loneliness of insomnia.
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Werner Herzog’s film Fata Morgana (1971) was a significant inspiration for Osborne. Herzog reportedly went to the North Africa with intentions to make a Sci-Fi film but ended up creating a poetic meditation on desert landscape.
