I’ve been making photographs in rural places since I was a kid in high school. The above picture of a cat walking in the snow at my grandparents’ Ohio farm was shot and printed when I was 16-years-old. The only print I have is yellow around the edges and the emulsion is cracked, probably because my darkroom back then was a closet in my parents’ basement, and my method for washing prints was to splash them around in water for a couple of minutes in my mom’s laundry tubs.
Not a lot has changed in the nearly 40 years since the making of the cat picture. Rural scenes still speak to my photographic heart, and this week I shot pictures that kind of please me as I did chores in my own barn here near Seattle, 2500 miles removed from my Ohio roots:
--There’s an image of our dog, Minnie, peeking in the barn door as she whimpered pathetically. Minnie would dearly have loved to come inside the barn with me, but she has a disgusting habit of munching on chicken poop. I don’t know that I’m teaching my dog any lessons, but I keep the door open just wide enough so that Minnie can smell --but not get her gross nose in -- the banquet the chickens have left behind.
--Our sheep, Jupiter and Sweet Pea, press in to visit with me and also nose-smear my camera lens. As I share this picture now publicly, I get some delight in fantasizing that this photograph might be seen in Germany, where a fussy lab-coat-wearing optical designer at Leica will shake his head and tisk-tisk in disapproval, knowing as he does that sheep schmutz is not at all conducive to optimal lens performance.
