Joachim Koester – The Barker Ranch !!
Snublede igen over noget interessant. Joachim Koester og hans fotoserie
“The Barker Ranch” - by Joachim Koester
The Barker Ranch is situated near the Paramount Mountains in a remote corner of Death Valley, California. Hard to access through the steep Goler Wash the desolate Ranch was the communal home of Charles Manson and his ”Family” for two years at the end of the sixties. From this location the “Family” roomed the surrounding desert in dune buggies. Like a scene out of Mad Max they would engage in a gradually more desperate hunt for ”the hole,” an entrance to a subterranean world that would serve as their shelter during the upcoming apocalypse or Helter-Skelter.
It is striking how the two locations that served as the “Manson Family’s” living quarters were embedded in frontier and filmic mythology. The Spahn Ranch (burned down in 1970) where the “Family” resided before the move to Death Valley was a ramshackle movie set for westerns (most of their meals were prepared and eaten in the former prison). Also the Barker Ranch was rich in filmic allusions. The Ranch was a classic hideout, a last stronghold in an area populated by prospectors, gold seekers, scientologists and ghosts towns. As for the actual film rumored to have been shoot during the Family’s stay at the Ranch most of it has mysteriously disappeared. Even 1,600 foot of Kenneth Angers infamous Lucifer Rising is most likely buried somewhere in the nearby desert. Family member Bobby Beausoleil, who played the role as Lucifer in the film, had fallout with Anger and drove away with the footage to the ranch.
The arrests and later sentencing of Charles Manson and five Family members for the gruesome murders of at least eight people, among these Roman Polanski’s wife Sharon Tate, were by many seen as the real deathblow to the hippie movement. Though the Manson family shared certain characteristics of the counterculture; the music, psychedelics, a vegetarian lifestyle and sexual permissiveness, the main inspiration for the group was the Bible and Scientology. This was a libertarian cult run amok, with far stronger ties to the violent American past than ever brought forth. The Family’s transgressions into hippie lure where amplified by the media and stirred a huge anti-counterculture campaign in the media. As the sixties came to an end these events, more than any, was seen as having a sobering effect on the emancipatory dreams within the counterculture.
The Barker Ranch today lies as a faint echo of the events that presided. My project is a series of 4 photographs and a text, an exploration of the dilapidated Ranch, which has been vacant since the Family lived there. I have documented the Barker Ranch as a slumbering site, a monument enmeshed in time, material traces of history as such, in a landscape heavily mythologised: all in all it is a “Western”.
Leave a Reply