Ben Rose is an artist and writer living in Jacksonville, Florida.

Fairfield is one of the oldest neighborhoods in Jacksonville, although its individuality is overshadowed by a sports complex and the greater downtown area. Looking at it now, it's hard to imagine the humble beginnings of a real community on the river's edge. The construction of the Matthews Bridge, “white flight,” and urban decay have transformed Fairfield into a faded carcass of what it used to be. A place where sidewalks are cracked and people only come to visit the stadium, a modern-day Florida Circus Maximus. A place where the front yards of hundred-year-old houses are turned into parking lots for football games once every few weeks, so the poor residents can make a buck out of living in the shadow of a multi-million dollar sports facility.

The single biggest reason for the dilapidated state of Fairfield was the construction of the Matthews Bridge in 1953. The bridge facilitated travel across the river, allowing affluent car-owning whites the opportunity to shop in newly developed shopping districts. Business soon slowed dramatically in the downtown area, signaling the beginning of downtown abandonment and urban decay. Fairfield, a unified community that got its name as the original Jacksonville fairgrounds in 1880, was left severed by roadways and left behind by industry.

I was very enthused about completing this “Ghost Landscape” project. Strapping on my 35mm film camera after loading it with black and white film, I was soon parking near the old Fairfield school, Public School Number Nine. The brick building is literally in the shadow of the Matthews Bridge. Driving west on the bridge, a driver can look down on the left and see the caged footbridge connecting the backyard of Fairfield with the eastern side of Fairfield. It was walking and taking photographs from this footbridge where I found a man moving about aimlessly in the middle of day. Two women on break outside of the school building, now housing services of the Jacksonville Urban League, seemed suspicious of me, but became enthusiastic after I explained I was from Florida State College, and that my project was inspired by “City of Bridges,” a documentary about the effect each bridge had on the downtown community.

While traveling on foot around Fairfield, the feeling I had was melancholy, but there definitely were working class people out and about, keeping the neighborhood alive. Two industrial workers on their lunch break outside of an old gas station and convenience store were amiable and curious, although they didn't want their picture taken. What struck me as the most tragic were the numerous lawns of archaic homes and vacant lots now used as parking areas for the stadium. The city has even gone so far as to post official street signs declaring the illegality of parking on some streets during game day. Here are lonely streets, rusting fences, overgrown trees and cracked sidewalks of a neighborhood raped and developed by city government and industry. I'm willing to bet that the only way for most Fairfield citizens to get into a football game at the stadium is to work concessions or some other service job at the stadium itself. At least the illegality of parking on game day allows locals to pimp out the grass in front of their century-old homes to the drunken white people that commute from every other part of town to watch the Jaguars lose.

The causes and effects of culture can become as confusing as the crisscrossing of roads, access ramps, and bridges that are now Fairfield. In the end, this project encouraged me to get out and see a Jacksonville neighborhood usually only viewed from a car window, high above. It felt good to walk the streets and get to know the city I now call home. I am looking forward to doing it again.

Although I didn't experience any literal “ghost” encounters, the process of completing this project did offer some strange occurrences. I remember the day of shooting photos my car was out of gas. Running on fumes, so to speak. I spent the time shooting, wondering if I would be trapped in old Fairfield, no money in my pocket, the latest victim of temporary poverty. I found out just how far an empty tank would get me that day.

My project almost seemed doomed for a while as my photos were tied up at the lab with three other rolls of film I was unable to pay for at once. Days seemed to slip away as if time itself was against my telling Fairfield's story. When I finally paid for and printed the photos, they came out a haunting blue. The film used was black and white. I cannot account for why the pictures turned out the way they did, nor can I explain why, out of four envelopes, the Fairfield pictures were marked as “damaged film,” the roll of negatives themselves chewed up by some unknown force.

But I had my pictures and didn't have to resort to using the backup color digitals. I was happy. I took them home and found four Bristol board panels on which to mount them. Then, for some reason, I overturned a nearly full bottle of black drawing ink all over the panels and desk. An oozing puddle of inky thickness slowly enveloping the virgin white stock. I panicked, spreading the ink further over the papers. How strange, I thought, for this to happen of the verge of completing an already late project.

This project wants to make itself, I thought. I let the ink run over the paper. Instead of cleaning it, I slipped my hands into it, smearing and spreading in random fashion, fingerprinting and hand-painting. Turning and shaking the paper. Rorschaching. I carried them, dripping, outside to dry.

Then it rained.

Here I was, strange blue photos in hand, a spilled reservoir of ink, wet paper baptized by the night sky. When the ink had set and the water dried, I explored composing the photos on the boards. How much stranger it was when the branches of the tree in the old Fairfield school photo lined up with the radial ink runs of one panel...

Did I make this landscape? Or did something else?

Fairfield Psychogeographical Map No. 2