Stanford Hills

In late 1988 and early 1989, I made a series of images in the Stanford Hills. In those days, they let you ride mountain bikes up there, and I packed either a Hasselblad or a 4×5 Linhof Master Technika around. There were also very few restrictions on where you could go. Things are different today, and I couldn’t make these images now, even if I were fit enough to cover the distances involved. Starting sometime at least as far back as WWII, the undeveloped property in the Stanford Hills has been used for scientific purposes. Some of those are obscure now, but radio astronomy is an obvious one. In many cases, when the experiments were complete, the equipment was simply abandoned in place, and by the time I got to it, nature was well on its way to reclaiming it. I was struck by the apparently careless use of the natural world by man, and by the relationship of nature — who always bats last — to the technology.