The Art of the Brick

172

173

aMboY

shotGun

Cloud

My sometimes-collaborator Dean West is

obsessed with clouds. For the most part, it’s

a nice obsession to have because it’s very

innocent. Clouds are beautiful; there’s nothing

nasty or dangerous about them. When we were

out on the road making the In Pieces show, we

were always having to pull over. Why? “Cloud.

I’ve gotta get a photo of it.” Dean just loves

clouds. And when he sees a good-looking cloud,

he takes a photo. He’s got stocks and stocks of

clouds that he can just drop into photos when he

needs them.

Clouds come floating into my life, no longer

to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color

to my sunset sky. —Rabindranath Tagore

174

It was in the Mojave Desert that Dean’s cloud

thing got us both into trouble. We’d been

driving around, trying to find abandoned-

looking buildings suitable for a particular

shoot.In Twentynine Palms we’d talked to

someone who said, “You should check out

Amboy.”

Amboy’s not completely desolate: The 2000

census put the population at four, though it was

difficult to see where they were living. There were

no houses I could see, and the entire town, if

you could call it that, consisted ofa church (with

no congregation), a school (with no students), a

gas station (with extortionate prices), and what

we thought was an abandoned motel. Amboy

was something of a destination in the Route 66

heyday, but in the ‘70s, a new highway bypassed

the town, and it fell into its current funk.

Apparently the town was purchased in 2007 by

an eccentric gentleman, Albert Okura, who was

going to rebuild and make it something, restore

Amboy to its former glory. At the time we visited,

Okura had reopened the gas station, but much of

the rest of the town still lay in disrepair.