Photo exhibit explores lonely roads and deserts

If Susana Bates had a choice in the matter, there would be no "road to zzyzx" photo exhibit, and her older brother would still be alive.

"I think he would be really proud of the show," she says, "but I wish we weren't having it." The exhibit officially opens Friday with a private reception and will be open to the public Saturday through June 4 at the Left of Center gallery in North Las Vegas.

Warren Bates, 49, was an assistant city editor at the Las Vegas Review-Journal. But that's not what defined him. In his off time, Bates trained his Nikon on some of the lonesomest places on earth. To him, Zzyzx Road was not an Interstate 15 exit to drive past on the way to Southern California. It was an invitation.

"The desert is ingrained deeply in my heart, coded into my DNA," Bates wrote on his website, then titled roadtozzyzx.com but since changed to warrenbatesphoto.com.

Bates relocated from his hometown of San Jose, Calif., to work at the R-J in 1985. But he didn't catch his shutter bug until the new millennium, inspired by photographers including Jeff Brouws, Walker Evans and his sister. (Susana freelanced for the New York Daily News. Bates called her "the pro in the family.")

Bates covered more than 100,000 Mojave miles in his last decade, searching for forgotten objects that scream in silence questions about those who left them behind: a school bus, its busted windows kissed by moonlight and sagebrush in "Abandoned Vehicles"; a Texaco sign rising on its poles from a lake in "Saltontex Sunset"; and rooms 25 and 26 of some motel, in "Doors," whose chipping paint and boarded windows suggest nothing but vacancies since the Ford administration.

Bates' most admired photo is "Bagdad Train." Grand-prize winner in a 2002 nocturnes.com night-photography exhibit, it shows the signpost for a California town where, for life in general and two intersecting trains in particular, stopping is no longer even a thought. (The last remaining residents "gave Bagdad its ghost," as Bates wrote, 40 years ago.)

Trains traverse the desert in four of the 22 photos Susana chose to display.

"It does add an element that I might not have seen if I was hanging the show without knowing what happened," says gallery director Marylou Evans.

It was a train traversing the desert -- eastbound from Bagdad, in fact -- that Bates chose to make the instrument of his own death on April 23. According to witnesses, he beat a BNSF locomotive to a crossing seven miles outside the California ghost town of Amboy, then pulled his Toyota truck onto the tracks and waited.

Bates appears to have imagined the ring of poetry in the details of his unexpected suicide. But those closest to him don't see it.

"I think there was something wrong in his head," Susana says. "I think he lost it."

Susana knew that her brother struggled with depression and insomnia, but says he was getting help.

"I thought he would get better and things would be OK," she says. "I couldn't have imagined that my brother would kill himself."

The exhibit hangs letters between the photos. They're addressed to Bates from the loved ones he left behind like the empty objects he once photographed.

"Your actions in your passing by suicide may have seemed logical to you, but it came as a complete shock to your family, your relatives and your friends," reads the one from Bates' father. "I recognize now that you were very ill."

Proceeds from the sale of Bates' photographs will benefit the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

Preview

What: "road to zzyzx: A Photography Exhibit by Warren Bates"

When: Noon-5 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, and 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Saturdays through June 4

Where: Left of Center gallery, 2207 W. Gowan Road, North Las Vegas

Admission: Free (647-7378)

Contact reporter Corey Levitan at clevitan@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0456.