When I was a freshman at Ohio State and was taking one of my first photography classes -- the time was the hippie-dippy early 70’s, the class was in the School of Art, and weirdness was very cool, as will be obvious in a moment -- I remember the day one of my fellow students, a beautiful young hippie chick (a descriptive term she would have been more than fine with) brought to class a print she had made. It was a black and white image, archivally processed, matted, and signed.
It was Art. And it was a picture of a penis.
Yes, the hippie chick had turned in (for academic credit, mind you) a really close-up, every-detail-in-sharp-focus photograph of a penis. And even in those free-and-easy, antiestablishment days, in that anything-goes classroom, everyone in class (including the professor, a bearded, blue-jeaned, sandal-wearing type not much older than the students) was taken-aback.
“What are you trying to say with your photograph,?” the professor asked, hoping I suppose to, um, stimulate artistic dialog.
“Oh, I dunno,” the young woman said, “I just kinda felt like being weird.” To which I’m sure we all replied: “Far Out.”
***
The above story came to mind this morning, as I guess I was feeling weird about an image I had made, a photograph not normally my style. I was out for a walk down a country lane near our house and I came upon a scene: A yoga ball, for some reason left by someone near an abandoned, fallen-down building. I took the picture, thinking that later I'd do some funky stuff to the image color saturation in Photoshop...and, you know what? I kind of like the picture. (There are even a couple of patches of melting snow, remnants from our recent storm...melting snow that's normally kind of dead-snow-ugly, but I like it that those are in the scene too.) The image is not my typical thing, but I like it anyway.
Far out.
