Ohhh... The Stories They Could Tell...
Welcome to my website - and my first "blog"...
I love all things old, vintage, antique…rusty. I might have inherited that from my mother. She was a collector of all things old and expensive that would later become obsolete and worthless. I believe that was her style of “self preservation”…
I don’t collect and save THINGS the way she did, but I do preserve “moments”… my moments and those of my clients. Pictures and photographs and paintings.
There is a line in the movie Kodachrome, spoken by Ed Harris’s character, Ben…
“We're all so frightened by time, the way it moves on and the way things disappear. That's why we're photographers. We're preservationists by nature. We take pictures to stop time, to commit moments to eternity. Human nature made tangible.”
When I heard those words spoken the first time, I thought, “Oh, if only I had heard this in high school – it would have been my ‘Senior quote’ in the yearbook! But it really rings true these days!
I’m 64 and received a Stage 4 Appendix Cancer diagnosis last year. (My third cancer DX). Enter CRS/HIPEC surgery – I don’t wish that on my worst enemy. Seriously. It was something out of sci-fi horror movie. Thank God for my camera. The truest statement I have ever spoken is that when I am behind the camera, out in the world taking photographs – that's when I'm thinking about my cancer, my new cancer body, my odds of survival and new expected life span, and all that I might miss out on, the state of the world or anything else – it’s all about getting the shot. It’s thrilling. It’s at times challenging. But always gratifying. So now, eight months after surgery, I’m once again out in the world preserving moments wherever I can find them.
The picture you see was taken at my grandparents' farm in South Georgia several years ago. They have been sitting behind the tractor barn for years, aging to perfection, and waiting for someone to listen to their story. The farm was passed to my cousin, who still runs it and a veterinarian practice five miles down the road “in town”.
I asked him if I could put them on my website. “OK, by me,” he said. “They are from a 1953 Ford pick-up. The story behind them is that they wouldn’t stay closed and when you went around a curve they would pop open. So we removed them and you knew you better hang on. Your Uncle Harry fell out of the truck one day.”
Oh, the stories they could tell…I hope Uncle Harry landed on a very soft shoulder on that old red dirt road.