Topic: Hay Stack (1 post)

Short Stack

I don't know about you but when I hear "short stack" I think of pancakes. In this  case, this is a group of pictures I made last summer while out shooting wheat fields in the Palouse. Short Stack is probably too few to call a real series but perhaps worth looking at. As you can see these are a few pictures of a hay stack (get the play on words?).

Throughout my career there have been times to "make" the photograph. Meaning to work it, to make something out of nothing, to use everything I've got to make art. And there are other times where my job just seems to be to capture something well. This seemed to be one of those times. 

That means simply walking around this imperfect rectangle of hay bales to document cleanly what was there. I have always liked making monumental something very ordinary and photography lends itself to doing that very well.

There is a wonderful line in the film "American Beauty" where the high school kid who shoots videos of everything is explaining to his maybe new girl friend the beauty of a plastic shopping bag being caught by the wind in an endless loop in the corner of a building in a shopping mall just before it begins to snow. As his camera follows the repetitive pattern of the shopping bag dancing around in the breeze, the kid says that he almost can't stand the beauty of things. That sometimes the world is so pure and beautiful it is almost too much to bear. 

(Reminder: you can see Short Stack larger by clicking on the image)


Topics: Hay Stack,Wheat,Palouse

Permalink | Posted December 9, 2012