Halloween in El Sobrante, Calif., is an irony-free zone.
It’s not that the town takes the day overly serious. It’s that the people who decorate their homes with skeletons, witches and dismembered torsos don’t take their decorations overly serious.
“No one’s trying to be witty here,” says Timothy Archibald, a longtime resident. “They’re just trying to say it.”
And one other thing: “They’re not doing it to be photographed.”
But photographed they are. For the past several years, Mr. Archibald has made a point of documenting how his neighbors in the community north of Berkeley celebrate the holiday.
The idea grew out of scene he spotted on Halloween evening in 2013. A neighbor’s yard was filled with costumed children at play. In Archibald’s image (slide 3), the light gives them a ghostly look.
“I think it was the first image I stumbled upon that opened the door for me to want to really explore the season in this town,” he said. “And as a photographer, once you get a magical photo, you try over and over to chase that magic.”
The photo foreshadows one he took this year of a yard, where a circle of gauze-and-wire ghosts danced. “With the setting sun, it felt like it really was this gathering of souls in a playful afterlife,” he says.
El Sobrante is both a commuter town and a working-class community, and when he is taking pictures of Halloween decorations, Archibald sometimes finds the more affluent sections of town less interesting. “They’re more tasteful there,” he says.
But he likes Halloween however it is celebrated – especially these days.
“It’s almost like the only thing I’ve seen that has been untouched by politics,” he said, like a man who has never toured the Upper West Side of Manhattan in October or seen a kid in a “Joe the Plumber” costume cheered on by the masses.
Mr. Archibald also seems to prefer Halloween to Christmas, at least as far as decorations go. Homes decked out for Christmas are often garish, he said, and rarely folksy.
And there is a broader difference.
“The Halloween stuff,” he said “never gives you a tingly, ‘Oh, life is beautiful’ feeling.”
It was not clear whether that was a good thing or a bad one.
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