There’s No Place Like Nome

In 2003 a 19-year-old Native American woman was found dead in an abandoned gold mine in Nome Alaska. Two years later, Nome police officer Matthew Clay Owens was convicted of her murder. Soon after his arrest, I was sent to photograph Nome for a magazine that went out of business before my essay was published. The place has haunted me ever since. More than any other location I’ve traveled in America, Nome evokes an authentic feeling of frontier rawness. So when Vice Magazine asked me if there was a place I wanted to travel, my first choice was to return to Nome.

Part of what attracts me to Nome is that it is a home for outsiders. Nome mushroomed over a century ago when three Scandinavians struck gold in Anvil Creek. Soon thousands of prospectors, prostitutes and other opportunists arrived. Natives from villages in the region also started making their way to the ‘Sin City of the North.’ But it was also a place where visitors seemed to disappear. Some have attributed this to the work of a serial killer, perhaps officer Owens. Others have speculated that this is work of UFO’s. In recent years, researches have concluded that these disappearances are the result of harsh weather and rampant alcoholism.

The first thing that disappears in Nome, it seems to me, is the natural law
and order or things. Well after midnight, while the treeless city hovers in an endless arctic sunset, small children roam the city and couples make rafts out of icebergs. And nearly every morning one can find a sad lost soul sleeping on the seafront rocks, nearly dead from one of the countless bottles of Monarch Canadian Whiskey bottles that litter the beach (“What’s the favorite drink in Nome?” the joke goes, “Monarch on the rocks.”)

As a photographer, I’ve never felt comfortable photographing outside my culture. When I’ve photographed in places like Beijing or Bogota, I feel like an invader or a fraud. While Nome feels as exotic to me as any foreign city, I’m also aware that it is a deeply American place created by outsiders for outsiders. This isn’t to say I ever once felt comfortable there. But it does feel like a place in which I could disappear.

– Alec Soth