Jerome Historic District

Author's Comments

Jerome is a town that does not sit on its hillside so much as cling to it. Thirty degrees of slope, a grid of streets that switchback rather than run straight, and buildings that lean into each other in ways that no level-built town ever has to. It photographs like nowhere else in Arizona, and the reason is geometry. The walls are not parallel to anything. The rooflines stack. I prefer Jerome in late October, mid-morning, when the light is coming over the town from the east and the Verde Valley below is still holding a little haze. The red rocks of Sedona are visible in the distance on a clear day, and from the upper streets you can frame a corrugated tin roof in the foreground against red sandstone twenty miles away. That compression is the photograph. A long lens earns its keep here in a way it rarely does in mining towns. The detail work is where I lose hours. Painted signage faded into the brick. Window frames that have gone a particular shade of weathered turquoise that you cannot mix in a darkroom or a computer. Iron railings on stairs that climb between buildings at angles that feel almost European. I walk uphill until my legs complain and then I work my way down, which is the only sensible direction to shoot a town built on a cliff. Golden hour belongs to the western faces, but do not leave before blue hour. The lights come on, the valley below goes lavender, and Jerome briefly becomes the strange luminous thing it must have been a hundred years ago when the smelters were running and the hill never went fully dark.

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