The Phantom Lake

Tulare Lake was once the largest body of fresh water in the American West, a vast inland sea in California’s Central Valley about halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. After its tributaries were dammed, diked and diverted a century ago, the lake dried up and the land was reclaimed for agriculture.

While little remained of the original Tulare Lake except for a few residual wetlands and marshes, the lake made several surprise comebacks in the second half of the 20th century. After reappearing in 1969, 1983, and 1997 following seasons of unusually heavy rainfall, some locals began referring to it as “the phantom lake.”

This year the lake has re-emerged once again. After one of the wettest winters in more than a century, the rivers carrying rain and snowmelt from the nearby Sierra Nevada mountains have overwhelmed the dams and levees designed to hold the water back, inundating an area the size of Lake Tahoe — about 180 square miles.

The lake is now so vast that when you gaze out from the water’s edge it extends as far as the eye can see, disappearing beyond the horizon like a shimmering mirage.

The floodwaters have been a disaster for the local economy of Corcoran, a community of about 22,000 people on the northeastern edge of Tulare Lake. While the levee protecting the town has held up, many of the low-lying ranches and farming operations on the other side of it have been completely inundated. It could take as long as two or three years for the waters to recede.

I’ve made several visits to Tulare Lake this year, documenting the devastation and talking with ranchers, farm hands, water officials and town residents about how the return of the lake has affected their lives and what it means for the future of their community. Here are a handful of my images.

For more images from the series, see Tulare: The Phantom Lake.

 

Bombay Beach Biennale 2023

When I started visiting the Salton Sea in the early 2000s, I was struck by the eerie silence that pervaded the place. The resort towns along the shore were largely abandoned—the shops and restaurants boarded up, the marinas empty, the trailer parks vacant and untended.

Bombay Beach, a small town laid out on a mile-wide grid on the eastern shore, epitomized the devastation. A succession of tropical storms had hit the area in the late 1970s and dumped so much rain into the Salton Sea that the water level rose by several feet. When the flood waters came to Bombay Beach, most of the residents vanished.

Bombay Beach Biennale 2023 (photo by Scott London)

As I wandered the empty streets of Bombay Beach, I was struck by the abandoned possessions in the driveways and front yards. Sun-bleached surf boards. Faded toys. Tattered paperbacks and magazines. Many of them were in situ, as if their owners had abruptly decided to leave one day and never returned.

Though Bombay Beach was quiet and deserted, it seemed to attract a steady stream of visitors. Artists, photographers, filmmakers and designers seemed especially drawn to the place. On nearly every visit, I would encounter a crew from L.A. making a music video or setting up a fashion shoot.

Later I learned that several Los Angeles artists had started buying up tax-defaulted Bombay Beach properties and turning them into makeshift artist studios, performance spaces, and canvases for creative expression.

The deserts of southern California are home to many renegade artist colonies. In nearby Slab City, the late folk artist Leonard Knight created a now-famous installation called Salvation Mountain—a monument to love and forgiveness—using strawbales and thousands of gallons of bright colored paint.

Down the road from Salvation Mountain lies East Jesus, a mecca of junk art made at the site of an old dump.

It seemed fitting that Bombay Beach would take its place among these artist communities. Nothing fires up the creative imagination quite like a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

In 2016, a filmmaker and two arts patrons from Los Angeles mounted a renegade art gathering over a long weekend to celebrate creativity, music and ideas as well as to spotlight the environmental crisis playing out at the Salton Sea. With a twist of irony, they called it the Bombay Beach Biennale.

It was the first of what has since become an annual gathering—one that has generated buzz in the art world and made headlines in newspapers and magazines worldwide. The Guardian calls it “a bohemian dream” and the New York Times, summing up what I love best about the event, describes it as “a pageantry of art and opera and weirdness.”

The 2023 Biennale just wrapped up last week.

Midabi’s artworks are a bit like Zen koans. They don’t give up their meaning easily. You have to sit with them and let the rational intellect run in circles for a while. Then, after the mind is all pooped and confused, the meaning will begin to reveal itself. The best art seems to have that effect—its deepest truths only come to us in a state of openness and wonder. His latest piece was one of several site-specific installations at this year’s event that focused on the environmental crisis playing out at the Salton Sea.

"The Fourth Hatch" at Bombay Beach Biennale (Photo by Scott London)

Memymom and Sean Guerrero positioned their artwork, “The Fourth Hatch,” a few feet out from the receding shoreline of the Salton Sea.

Free Love, Bombay Beach Biennale (Photo by Scott London)

The Free Love Phone Booth by artist Irondad.

Bombay Beach Biennale 2023

How many gallons of water does it take to grow a pound of almonds? This installation by Uwe Martin gives you a rough idea. Each point of light in the photo is actually a plastic bottle of sea water reflecting the sky in the early-morning twilight. Almonds are among the most water-intensive crops and it takes approximately 1,900 gallons to grow a pound of them.

 

Burning Man 2022

After two years of cancelations due to the pandemic, there was a lot of pent-up creative energy and an almost feverish excitement going into 2022. Maybe a little too much. There were many impressive art installations, outrageous mutant vehicles, brilliant fire performances and transcendent dance parties. But there were also intense winds, day-long whiteouts and triple-digit temperatures for much of the week. Equipment failed, activities were canceled, and systems broke down — like the chaotic 8-hour traffic jam as people were exiting the event. Here are my photos along with some reflections on this year’s event.

Renegade Burn 2021

Renegade Burn 2021 (photo by Scott London)

Burning Man was canceled again this year because of the pandemic, and I don’t think any of the thousands of people who gathered in the desert expected anything other than a big campout under the stars. Nothing was organized. There were no streets, no fences, no porta-potties, no big artworks, no “Man” to set on fire. In fact, the Bureau of Land Management had imposed a strict fire ban this year. So when we all gathered in a huge circle on Saturday night, it was understood that there wasn’t going to be a show or any fireworks or anything burned to the ground.

But something phenomenal happened. Studio Drift, an artist collective from Holland, mounted a show using drones flying in close formation. The drones — visible only as tiny points of light — rose into the sky and, like a murmuration of starlings, swooped and whirled in dazzling configurations. After a few minutes they went dark. Then they suddenly lit up again in the formation of an enormous man, some 150 feet tall. His arms slowly went up, and he twirled around like a dervish as the crowd went wild.

Shivers rose up my spine and I experienced a euphoric rush unlike anything I’ve felt in a good long time. It wasn’t quite a “burn,” but it had the full effect of one. Powerful medicine — especially after this long and dark year we’ve all lived through.

Aerial view of Renegade Burn 2021 (photo by Scott London)

We don’t know how many people attended Renegade Burn 2021. There was simply no way to get an accurate count. Even if there were, the numbers kept fluctuating as people came and went throughout the week. Some who attended camped miles away from the action, or off-playa. And people showed up from multiple directions, complicating the effort to measure the number of vehicles entering the area from the usual access points.

I’ve been poring over my aerial photos — like the one above — to get some sense of the numbers. As a baseline for comparison, I’ve been using aerial pictures from last year (see photos) when there were 3,500 people on the playa, according to the BLM rangers who were doing their best to keep count. My guess is that there were between 15,000 and 20,000 people on the scene this year. Others say that figure is probably too high. Regardless, it felt massive.

Much has already been written about Renegade Burn. The big question on everyone’s mind is what the success of the gathering will mean for the future of Burning Man. Was it the end of the event as we’ve known it for so many years, or perhaps the beginning of something new and better? For more on this, see for example:

The last two pieces in the list both feature some of my images.

Click below to view the complete set of photos from the 2021 Renegade Burn

(Not) Burning Man 2020

Burning Man 2020 was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic. But that didn’t stop some of us from heading out to the Black Rock Desert anyway.

When I got there mid-week—on what would have been the third day of the event—there were already hundreds of people on the scene. And the numbers kept growing.

By the weekend, there were an estimated 3,500 people on the playa, a ranger with the Bureau of Land Management told me, and all or most of them were burners.

An aerial view of an impromptu gathering in the Black Rock Desert during the week of Burning Man 2020

It all looked very familiar. There were theme camps, art installations and mutant vehicles. And gorgeous, creatively-costumed people everywhere. Yet it was all unplanned, self-organized, free.

Unlike Burning Man, there were no trash fences, no speed limits, no restrictions beyond those we set for ourselves. You could camp anywhere, kick up as much dust as you liked, go for a dip in the nearby hot springs, even make late-night beer runs to Gerlach.

Gone were the turnkey camps, the celebrity artists, the mayors tours, the VIP lounges, the staffers with badges and walkie-talkies.

Not Burning Man 2020

The gathering was marked by a sense of radical spontaneity—what we used to call immediacy before the term became a codified principle. It was as if everyone had arrived much the way I did—not expecting anything in particular but thrilled to discover a free-form party kicking into gear.

There was something blissful about just showing up. You didn’t have to win the ticket lottery or buy a vehicle pass. All you needed was a shade structure, a few things to share and a love of the open desert.

Inevitably, there was a lot of talk about the early beginnings of Burning Man. This was what the event was like in the early days, according to several veterans I spoke with. (After almost two decades of attending the event, I think of myself as a veteran at this point. But these guys remembered what Burning Man was like in the early 1990s.)

The Burning Man organization has lost its way, they said. Too much of its attention is focused on spreading the gospel and changing the world. In their view, the organization needs to go back to basics and recover something fundamental that has been lost.

The sentiment was summed up on a sticker affixed to a miniature replica of the Man out on the open playa: “Make Black Rock City great again.”

Burning Man 2020 wasn’t exactly canceled. Like many other gatherings this year, it was moved online and reimagined as a kind of virtual experience.

It was a great idea under the circumstances. But after so many months under lockdown, I felt that I was already spending too much time on the computer. What I needed was to get off the internet and out of the default world.

As it turned out, I wasn’t alone. Thousands of other people had come to the same conclusion. We longed for the playa and  decided we’d rather have the desert without Burning Man than Burning Man without the desert.

For more photos, view the complete set from 2020. Or check out my other Burning Man images here.