Bombay Beach: The Resort That Became a Ruin That Became an Art Fair

Bombay Beach was designed to be a vacation destination. In the nineteen-forties, developers platted it as a lakefront community on the eastern shore of the Salton Sea, and sold lots to families who imagined summers on the water. The sea was at its peak as a resort then. There were beaches. There was a real community with a post office and a market. People built houses.

Then the sea changed. The salinity crossed the threshold that supported fish, and the fish died. The die-offs produced the smell. The hydrogen sulfide that accompanied decomposing fish and rising salt levels was not subtle. Visitors stopped coming. The permanent residents held on for a while, and then most of them left. The houses that could be sold were sold. The ones that could not were abandoned. The shoreline retreated, leaving mud and salt flat where the beach had been.

A few hundred people stayed. For various reasons that are different in each case, they did not leave.

In twenty sixteen, a group of artists and filmmakers organized the first Bombay Beach Biennale in the ruins of the abandoned resort. They installed sculpture in crumbling swimming pools, projected films on ruined walls, and held discussions between trailers about art and failure and the ethics of making meaning from someone else's catastrophe. The event attracted international attention. It returned annually.

What the Biennale exposed was a genuine tension that has not been resolved: the people who stayed because they had no better option, and the artists who arrived because the ruins were photogenic, are not describing the same place. Both are in the photographs. One of them is the subject of those photographs, and one of them took them.

Bombay Beach is still there. The people who stayed are still there. So are the artists, for a few weeks each year.