This being Halloween and all, people are talking a lot about what is “spooky.”
Ghosts are spooky. Skeletons are spooky. Monsters are spooky.
Personally I think photographs are spooky...or, at the very least, they are a witches brew, concocted from a pinch of vision, a dash of artistic hocus-pocus, and a whole lot of happenstance.
This morning I was walking down the gravel lane that leads to our house. I glanced absent-mindedly over at my neighbor’s barn, and, framed through one of the barn doors, was the American flag that hangs in front of another neighbor’s house.
“That’s a picture,” I thought.
None of the ingredients of this photograph ever changes: The barn is anchored in a concrete foundation, and, even when the strongest autumn wind comes howling down off the Olympic Mountains on the scariest of Halloween eves, the barn never moves...and the flag always hangs from that same flagpole. I have walked up and down that gravel lane hundreds, maybe thousands of times and I like to think of myself as an observant fellow, yet I’ve never noticed the possibility of this photograph.
This morning I saw it.
Oh, this Art Stuff is spooky to me.
