Immediately after wrapping up the 2018 Halloween season, I sat down and went through the night's photos.
In one last burst of creativity, I decided to take a handful and just see how far I could filter them and ended up creating a small art project. The one thing that I had noticed about the photos from Halloween night was the amount of color in each. It was something that I had started to worry about—that is, using too many colors in my display and giving it an almost Christmas light effect. EEK!
I took the photos and went in the completely opposite direction, stripping all color out of each, adding layers of decay and grit to accentuate the bare rawness of the subjects.
The results were pretty cool, but as the post-Halloween burnout quickly settled in late last year, I ended up shelving the project. I had the series of photos done, but I never did anything with them.
Until now.
In the run-up to this October, the Halloween fire is once again starting to stoke up, so I decided to revisit the photos and finally publish them all.
The term "salted earth" came to mind as a cool name for the series, but as I thought more about it the name took on more of a double-meaning.
In the literal sense, "salting the earth" was symbolic of spreading salt to wipe out an area of a conquered enemy, rendering the land useless for crop production. Similar to removing color and life, leaving only the harshness of raw black and white lifelessness.
It also came to represent the final season of Highbury Cemetery in its old location, leaving only waste as we moved to our new home earlier this year. The land, as I joked, was rendered useless for any future haunt display.
So this name stuck. And after nearly 11 months of sitting on the shelf, I finally present my 2018 photo project, The Salted Earth Series.
01. Rise of The Undead
02. Le Cadavre de Vodoun
03. The Guardian of the Tombs
04. The Obelisk's Watchman
05. The Spectre's Shriek
