In 2009 I began crafting a series of images in and around The Great Salt Lake in Utah. After dozens of shoots and countless images later the collection called 'Mysteries Of The Big Salty Lake' found its natural ending with Rainey and Jed providing the wild and unfettered beauty that I'd long been hoping for. Mysteries Of The Big Salty Lake is now complete.
We traveled to the north end of the lake to Rozel Point, a stone's throw from Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty. It's a place of harsh magic where oil oozes from the earth, the water has 27% salinity and the wooden remnants of long ago oil rigs still haunt the landscape. It's crazy dry up there and the wind can whip fiercely while storms move in quickly across the lake from the desert. V shaped formations of brown pelicans fly effortlessly overhead from their home on Gunnison Island while the occasional snake slithers underfoot. For the past 12 years it's been my favorite place on the lake to shoot. Journeying there with my models is a ritual I've loved and will certainly miss. It feels good to have said goodbye with Rainey and Jed providing so much magic to the collection.
There's a lot to share about this shoot and I'll do that in the next few weeks. The selection and editing of images is a process that takes a lot of time when models like Rainey and Jed have delivered one astonishing moment after another.
All of the images on this page, on this post and on this blog are Copyrighted by Tom Clark and may not be used in any form, digital or otherwise, without specific written permission.
In a particularly intimate part of the shoot Jed and Rainey took turns cutting her hair.
Jed is my partner of many years and Rainey is a longtime friend and muse. Both have a natural ferocity and spirited beauty that kept playing itself out in my imaginations, so I bought some sheer black fabric for them to play with and got them out to Rozel. This shoot delivered on the promise of Jed and Rainey working together as they danced and played their way across the dry crusty lake bed.
The waters of the Great Salt Lake are rapidly disappearing forever so I'm glad I've done all the work there that I wanted to do. There is a strange sadness to the area now with the salty waters nowhere in sight. If you hike out far enough you'll find the water but we didn't need to as the wooden pilings and vast open horizon of the dessicated lake bed gave us all of the environmental beauty we could ever hope for. An old rusted iron bouy has always been a favorite go-to for pictures.
A couple of tourists from Europe wandered by as we were ending our shoot so I took the opporrtunity to have one of them take a picture of us. Mission completed - a somewhat sentimental ending to an extraordinary 12 year journey in and around the Great Salt Lake.