Corrosion is an abstract eye on metal. Derelict cars, trucks, trains, planes, boats, and bunkers. Abandoned factories, fortifications, mines, and mills. Disintegrating tools, spare parts, machinery, and equipment. Artifacts, junk, scrap, detritus. Rust never sleeps, eventually returning substantial steel creations to the earth, as nothing more than dust blowing in the wind. Protective paint layers perish, crackle, flake, and peel away, to slowly expose insidious ferric oxides to the weather.

 

Wall Candy
That's what we think of our beautiful contemporary fine art photography...

 

Sandon, in west Kootenay, British Columbia, is a ghost town and home to an eccentric scrap metal hoarder and dealer. His fascinating collection of historical Vancouver trolley buses includes complete pedigrees. Breaking through the gloomy sky, a fleeting spark of sunlight exploded off our gold reflector, igniting the fire dancer masquerading in this metal Mardi Gras.

 

Moose, porpoise, grouse, squirrel, fish – spirit animal apparitions in a crumpled hunk of junk up at Gavin & Shirley MacInroy’s scrap yard, on Old Hedley Road, near Princeton, BC. Gavin’s youthful vocation was in the logging industry. Retirement days are now occupied with unique recreational activities such as cutting flunked school buses in half.

Behind our Ashburton lodging grew a potato patch. Behind the potato patch withered a row of little old cars. The land owner had erected a flash new Quonset to showcase his bright, shiny, restored car collection. I left a note on the locked gate. The spud grower phoned, and through his rather muddy accent, said pictures were ok, with him. In a dewy dawn we hopped the fence to search the Canterbury castaways for texture. Crackle can either create a problem, or be a desired effect, for painters. But I discovered this exquisite gilded sample swatch in auto parts.

World War II defence for Lyttelton Harbour/Whakaraupo was established at Godley Heads gun emplacements. Twisting and exposed, it was a treacherous haul across the volcanic Port Hills to Christchurch. Warning shots were never fired, and the Big Guns were never actually installed before the war ended. Incurring considerable damage during the recent earthquakes, much of the National Heritage Site now has restricted access. Fascinating bunkers, tunnel, and trails were open to explore before the earth shook. Armoured iron door latches, frozen in time, fading and rusting away.

Soaring peaks burnished in a smoky red sunset. Fair-weather altocumulus clouds streaking across the sky. A pipeline runs through it. Un-interred, this pipe was languishing behind the abandoned Greenwood Coal Mine Historical Site, across the street from Blairmore, Alberta.

 

Near Wanaka is the little Otago crossroads of Luggate, where Church Road deaks off to the famous Red Bridge. Travel guide pictures of the landmark abound, so I didn’t need to stop. Line up some junked old trucks, on the other hand... Battered, bent, and broken accident victims, banished to the empty lot, forlorn and forgotten, nowhere else to go. Almost walked away from this one! Courageously, I climbed up into the disintegrating bed of a pickup truck and fired down at the roof. Fur coated Ford.

Behind our Ashburton lodging grew a potato patch. Behind the potato patch withered a row of little old cars. The land owner had erected a flash new Quonset to showcase his bright, shiny, restored car collection. I left a note on the locked gate. The spud grower phoned, and through his rather muddy accent, said pictures were ok, with him. In the dewy dawn we hopped the fence to search the castaway bones for colour. Drew red blood on the barbed wire. Took green stinging nettles on the shin. Found gold in Canterbury. Corroding auto parts. Junk. Scrap. Detritus.

Travel guides feature a photo of this world famous safe with a backdrop of the Sandon Ghost Town and Selkirk Mountains. Hills riddled with more mine shafts per acre than anywhere else in British Columbia. You’d never know how interestingly beautiful this old, rusted out, gold safe really is, looking at those travel pictures. An iron butterfly hinge emerging from a safe chrysalis.

Blown ashore during a violent storm, the Brockton II is ship wrecked on McLoughlin Bay, near the private wharf at Bella Coola, BC. A well equipped foreign photographer arrived at the scene too, but he was actually looking for bears! (Tourists?!) Clambering down amongst the rubble, barnacles, mussel shells, and stinking muck, I focused up at the slimy, limey, corroding hull. High tide would soon conceal these beautiful colours lurking below.

Ghost Truck Phantom 309 corroding away at the Sandon Ghost Town. A truly fitting location to encounter an apparition of the legend of Big Joe. Courtesy of a mysterious scrap metal dealer deep in the foreboding Selkirk mountains of British Columbia. Prospecting with a gold reflector gives the headlights an intangible glow under a brooding sky.

Idle and decaying, the Glengary tug boat is moored at Government Wharf in Bella Coola, BC. Gossip inferred that the boat design was too narrow, and thus quite unstable, for the stormy waters of McLoughlin Bay. Piercing the hull is a Hawsehole, or cat hole, for those huge towing and mooring ropes called hawsers. Bridge and cabin structures were a flamboyant crimson.

There are no roads here... Nearly everywhere else on the Alberta map is criss-crossed by
right-of-ways surveyed every mile east/west, every two miles north/south. These two empty townships of wild aspen parkland and native prairie grasslands are the Rumsey Natural Area and Environmental Reserve – hummocky moraine left behind by retreating continental ice sheets. Thrown over a post in the dilapidated rodeo grounds was a left-over roll of barbed wire.

Don’t let the bed springs bite! And if they do, just grab a camera, and shoot some black and blue. Reflected gold helps warm up the bed with a sparkle of sunlight. Just some beautiful old detritus stashed away at the Sandon Ghost Town scrap metal dealership. West Kootenay, BC.

 

Behind our Ashburton lodging grew a potato patch. Behind the potato patch withered a row of little old cars. The land owner had erected a flash new Quonset to showcase his bright, shiny, restored car collection. I left a note on the locked gate. The spud grower phoned, and through his rather muddy accent, said pictures were ok, with him. In the dewy dawn we hopped the fence to search the castaway bones for colour. Drew red blood on the barbed wire. Took green stinging nettles on the shin. One of the old Canterbury cars sported a crimson door, an azure fender, and corrosion unveiled a lacy purple petticoat.

SS Cardena was a twin-screw passenger and cargo steamer commissioned in Scotland. She was in Union service from 1923 to 1959, sailing weekly on a northern cannery and logging camp route to the Skeena River and Bella Coola. She had a passenger licence for 150, with 132 cabin berths and 60 deck settees. Cargo capacity was 50 tons, with refrigeration for 30 tons of boxed fish plus 11,000 cases of canned salmon. Her hull was expended as part of an intriguing breakwater at Kelsey Bay, near Sayward, BC. Low tide reveals green algae colours mixed with salmon and violet hues.

Near Wanaka is the little Otago crossroads of Luggate, where Church Road deaks off to the famous Red Bridge. Travel guide pictures of the landmark abound, so I didn’t need to stop. Line up some junked old trucks, on the other hand... Battered, bent, and broken accident victims, banished to the empty lot, forlorn and forgotten, nowhere else to go. Patterns and colours fading away on the cab reminded me of the famous painter’s style – weird, shifted, faces.

Exhumed, contorted, and corrugated, this galvanized cadaver has been abandoned to the elements at the Sandon Ghost Town scrap metal dealership. West Kootenay, BC.

Before environmental awareness surged into popular public concern, sawmills disposed of their refuse in conical or tipi shaped burners. At night, when the blazing fires exhaled, the spark arrester would glow red like a cigar, and escaping embers would zigzag carelessly away into the darkness. Derelict and abandoned, this tipi burner near Puntzi, is on the lonely Freedom Highway wandering across the Chilcotin Plateau in central British Columbia.

Gavin & Shirley MacInroy’s scrap yard, on Old Hedley Road, near Princeton, BC, is a fascinating cacophony of gorgeous junk: cars, trucks, buses, machinery, and literally tons of miscellaneous metal parts. A veritable iron stew, with a bouquet garni of pine trees, thickened with sawdust. Gavin was pretending not to be retired, playing on a small bulldozer “cleaning up the place”. LOL!

Near Wanaka is the little Otago crossroads of Luggate, where Church Road deaks off to the famous Red Bridge. Travel guide pictures of the landmark abound, so I didn’t need to stop. Line up some junked old trucks, on the other hand... Battered, bent, and broken accident victims, banished to the empty lot, forlorn and forgotten, nowhere else to go. Warm yellow stands out vividly against dense black, as the flat tyre wraps a natural vignette around the steel wheel.

Cabin doors on the Brockton II, shipwrecked on McLoughlin Bay, near the private wharf at Bella Coola, BC. A palette of colourful layers were peeling and crackling, slowly revealing themselves to the weather. Crackle can either create a problem, or be a desired effect, for painters.

Idle and decaying, the Glengary tug boat is moored at Government Wharf in Bella Coola, BC. Gossip inferred that the boat design was too narrow, and thus quite unstable, for the stormy waters of McLoughlin Bay. Vivid red steps access the bridge.

Big Joe and Phantom 309, from Tom Waits “Nighthawks at the Diner” tribute to Red Sovine, written by Tommy Faile. This Canadian Kenworth was perhaps the tow truck for a collection of expired Vancouver trolley buses stored by the eccentric scrap metal dealer in Sandon, the infamous Ghost Town in West Kootenay, British Columbia. Panning with a gold reflector gives ghostly headlights an ethereal luminescence.

Travel guides feature a photo of this world famous safe with a backdrop of the Sandon Ghost Town and Selkirk Mountains. Hills riddled with more mine shafts per acre than anywhere else in British Columbia. You’d never know how interestingly beautiful this old, rusted out, gold safe really is, looking at those travel pictures. A petrified combination of brass and steel, locked in a fossilized embrace.