Blog 5: Joshua Tree on Film

I wasn’t going to make the same mistakes on this roll of film.  I had no expectations for this roll of film and a beautiful subject: Joshua, well more specifically Joshua’s trees.  Joshua Tree is only about 2 hours away from Los Angeles but it feels like stepping onto another planet. In South Central Los Angeles you can’t look more than a couple hundred feet before your eye line meets a building, and that bothers me.  Sometimes I feel like Downtown Los Angeles feels like a maze meant to keep people from leaving… maybe that’s just me.  

Anyways, anytime I get the chance to break free, I take it, with little regard to what it may cost me in gas.  If there is one thing I learned about Joshua Tree, before even entering the park, is that there is more to Joshua Tree than just Joshua Tree.  

(If you’re taking a shot every time I say Joshua, then that last sentence just did you in.)

Before entering Joshua Tree, my friend and artist had us detour to the Noah Purifoy Desert Art Museum.  The Desert Art Museum is an expansive open park in the middle of the desert with massive structures that Noah built during his lifetime.  The structures are whimsical and surrounded by nothing but dirt and rocks, the art feels like deliberately placed ruins. Experiencing art in this way made me question how I see art and what I think about when I look at art.  At first glance the art feels haphazardly placed, but that is so deceitful. My shock grew when I began thinking about how to make these structures stand by themselves in the desert for years.  

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