IMCA: Roderik Henderson

Name: Roderik Henderson
Country Of Origin: Netherlands
Country Now Residing: Canada
Title: The Cave

The world has changed dramatically since 1999, which is when I left the Netherlands, Europe, to go and live in the desert for several years. And when I had to return to Europe recently, I noticed that a sense of home, culture, belonging were all gone…

“The Cave” is part of the series “Our life in a town of ghosts” which is the photographic journal of my prolonged stay in a remote semi ghost town hidden in the High Desert of Eastern Nevada. Together with my pregnant wife Tanya, we came here while traveling and photographing the deserts of New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, Utah, Texas, Californië and Nevada extensively. We had been roaming the North American deserts continuously as photographing nomads: a journey through world’s ultimate void, searching for the lucidity of naked rock and burning sand. No thoughts, no dreams, no ambitions – only absolute, sublime nothingness.

This little town, counting only 30 inhabitants, couldn’t be farther away from the rest of the world. With our daughter Fay almost ready to be born, we decided to move out of our old Argosy travel trailer, in order to build us a humble shelter out of rock, dead trees and salvaged lumber. I did odd jobs for the locals: repairing fences, hauling firewood from the mountains, building stables, etc. This way we became part of this community of misfits. That’s when I was able to start documenting daily life here in this obscure place.

I consider this town a mimic world: a micro universe where the handful inhabitants are the world’s entire population, the surounding desert the complete world. Beyond the horizon, there seems to be nothing.

Eventually, the absence of people here became as important in my photos as their presence. A fork rammed in the kitchen wall and a fridge riddled with bullets, half made beds, and dirty dishes in an abandoned house were all emphasizing the absence of people so dramatically, that these artefacts changed into trophies of anti-existence – like deep black holes in a typically domestic setting.

This had a reason. Earlier I had photographed the Nevada Test Site, North of Las Vegas, where the landscape has been transformed into the cratered surface of a faraway planet, with all the nuclear weaponry that has been experimentally blasted to smithereens. The ghost town we were calling home, was, like many such places in the Southwest, a down winders community. Radioactive fallout from those tests had quietly blanketed the desert here during the fifties & sixties.

“Our life in a town of ghosts” depicts the world as a silent place where no values exist. Here, civilization is just a greasy residue that sticks on everything that ever was.

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