Southern Musings

Imperial

by William T. Vollman

I really didn't read this book, I looked at the pictures. Mr. Vollman has a companion book, Imperial, that tells about the history of the Imperial Valley in California and Mexico. I've got a request in at the library for that one.

The Imperial Valley is an area in southern California and northern Baja Mexico that includes the border between the two nations and the Salton Sea and Colorado River. I don't know anything about the area but what I can see in the pictures that Mr. Vollman took and placed in this book.

Looking at the pictures, this is an agricultural area with some manufacturing gone very wrong areas (high lead contamination from an abandoned lead smelting facility and polluted waterways and canals). It is a poor area (people and environment) and contains the corrugated tin sided nightclubs and lap dancers and strippers and beer options along dusty roads that provide poor entertainment for the poor.

The people are mainly descended from native Americans (on both sides of the border) and there are some Anglo farmers and eccentrics. As an aside, I have to say that most of the Mexicans and Mexican-Americans that I know are of Lebanese descent, so there is that qualification when I use the term "Mexican". Am I making any sense---nah, I don't think so either.

The pictures are in black and white and some are sepia tinted. Mr. Vollman takes the viewer directly into the Imperial Valley with his photos. He has no captions below the pictures and explains nothing. He lets the viewer just look and draw her own conclusions.

There are two essays by Mr. Vollman in the back of the book. One is babble worthy of Aleister Crowley about taking photographs and what they represent. Skip it. Mr. Vollman was high when he wrote it and it was a talkative, dis-associative high. Just like one of those endless and fruitless marijuana high discussions about the meaning of Plato. Yeah, Doobie Socrates.

The second essay is labeled Technical Notes and discusses camera lens apertures and film and photo development. I know nothing about the subject and really don't care to know about it, but this was interesting to me. I still don't know the difference between 35mm or 270mm and a Kodack or Wisner camera, but I did find that Mr. Vollman's technical discussion gave me an idea of the photographer and what he valued and what he wanted to capture when he took his pictures. It gave me a better understanding and a viewpoint for his pictures.

There are also very brief and non-discursive photo captions in the back of the book. They were very informative for me, because when I was looking at a picture of a corrugated tin fence (corrugated tin is the main building block in this valley) with a tire placed high on the wall, I thought that it was the playground for some sort of ball game. Get the ball in the tire. When I finally read Mr. Vollman's caption, I found out that the wall was a border fence and that the tire was placed to aid the climber to get over the fence to the other side. That is a different sort of ball game scoring and refereeing and is much more crucial for the players and the spectator (me).