Abandoned train in Salk Desert, Bolivia 🇧🇴
[Image: An old rusty steam train on some tracks. The tracks are in a very shallow large lake that stretches off into the distance. End ID]
*slaps boiler* You can fit so many ghosts in this baby
This is not a photo. It's a painting that has been posted, uncredited, to quite a few social medias over the past decade or so, by the reverse image search results. A lot of people seem to think it's a photo/realistic painting of a train graveyard in the Uyuni Salt Flat in Bolivia, from the reflective surface. However, this train (and, very likely, the location as painted) almost certainly does not exist.
This painting is "Dead End" by surrealist South African artist Keith Alexander.
Information is pretty hard to come by about the artist or this painting. He passed away in 1998, and he did not have a personal website I could find. Another guy put up a website to display some information about Alexander and (with the permission of his estate) sell prints of his works, but that website went defunct in \~2022. It now exists only as a facebook page. I think the webmaster may have knnown Alexander in person, but that's speculation. I am certain he is Alexander's biggest fan (I may email him to ask). According to this webmaster's blurb about Alexander, he took a lot of inspiration from southern Africa (certainly, the images that can still be found online do, with a number of landmarks seeming to serve as inspiration).
According to the defunct site (archived article), this picture was heavily inspired by the Martin Luther, a German-built train from 1895 meant to replace ox wagons when it had colonized what is now Namibia. In true failgirl spirit, it stopped working in 1897 and was left to rot in the desert (though it's been restored several times since and now has a shed).
There is an actual train graveyard in Uyuni, Bolivia (Atlas Obscura) which has much more modern trains like that. People seem to assume this painting is of one of these trains becuase of the graveyard's proximity to the Uyuni Salt Flat. However, it isn't actually in the salt flat (evidenced by the surrounding dirt in the pictures), though it seems close enough for local tourism companies to go to both.
Whichever train Alexander took any inspiration from is not verifiable. As Alexander painted a lot of surrealist pieces (it's hard to find pictures of his work, but some can be found here, here, and here), it can't necessarily be claimed that, just because the train he painted resembles a train rotting away in a graveyard, and that the supposed inspiration is much smaller and better-preserved, he must have been inspired by the Bolivian train. Similarly, because he's dead, it can't be said wasn't (though the webmaster is a better authority than anyone else exposed to the internet).
I dunno. The painting is really pretty, and it made me sad that there wasn't credit given, and more sad that the only information behind the piece is a secondhand account from a website primarily designed to sell the artist's work that requires multiple archival sites to view all of it. There's no complete online gallery of his work, from what I can tell - apparently, there are few high-definition photographs of his art to begin with outside of auction houses. There's barely any unarchived information about him.
This post might be one of the better collections of information about him that exists outside of an internet archive.
I don't know who he was. I don't know what he believed in, or stood for. I only really know that the webmaster loved his art enough to share it for over 20 years after his death. One person's love for Keith Alexander's art is the only reason I know anything about him or his work beyond this picture.
I could only hope to be so lucky for someone to love my work so much.
Reblogging this version
