Downtown Roosevelt, Oklahoma

Roosevelt Roosevelt is a small, all-but-aban­doned town in west­ern Oklahoma. According to the lat­est cen­sus, the pop­u­la­tion num­bers 248. Today it’s known as a mas­sive auto­mo­bile morgue: sev­eral auto sal­vage com­pa­nies have set up shop there, and today the corpses of cars and trucks out­num­ber the living. 

The town once boasted a beau­ti­ful Art Deco high school, and across the street, an iden­ti­cal build­ing hous­ing the Arts and Crafts school. Those build­ings are now derelict and empty, apart from some sal­vage auto­mo­biles in tem­po­rary stor­age in the high school.

The five build­ings shown are a for­mer bank, now occu­pied by city hall, the for­mer Nash’s Department Store, which used to host the Masonic lodge upstairs, an uniden­ti­fied build­ing with a hand-scrawled sign read­ing Moose and Squirrel, another for­mer bank which later housed a phar­macy, a for­mer grocer’s, and a final unknown building.

Camera

Hasselblad 500C

Lens

Carl Zeiss Distagon 50mm ƒ/4.0

Focal length

50mm

Aperture

ƒ/​11

Exposure

~¹⁄₆₀ sec­ond @ EI 125

Film

Adox Adonal (Rodinal) (1:100) for ~60 min­utes — 5 min­utes in Kodafix

Tripod

Ries J-600 “Reporter” maple­wood tri­pod with lus­ter bronze knobs 

Digitization & post-production

Epson per­fec­tion V850 scan­ner with VueScan scan­ning soft­ware, Adobe Lightroom, NIK Silver Efex Pro, and Adobe Photoshop.