Maggie's Farm

It's a cool picture, like the ones in James Agee's "Let us now praise famous men". Will go hunting more of hers to admire. Thanks.

But I love color photos myself, and not just cute kiddie birthday cakes and fluffy puppies.... Plenty of emotion comes thru IMHO. Loss, regret, delight,mockery aching loneliness,murder, agony, the fierce yellow of a gull's grasping claw over cold blue winter ocean, the slimy brown of crustacean plucked from shattered purple shell, fifty shades of bluegreen in a preening peacock's zoo tail! The red buds swelling fiery spring at the tip of winter brown branches. Hope. Messy as life, as sippican put it in that excerpt here in the blog today. Messy, jarring, beautiful in clashing complexity.

To me, black and white photos mainly appeal because they keep us at one remove, like a friend of mine who likes to stay always just out of reach, masked, mysterious. More emotion to be imagined about the partially revealed than experienced when it's all out there.

Black and white has Serious Photographer connotations. By definition they are shot, developed and viewed with more care than garishly realistic digital color which can capture Nature in all it blooming, buzzing confusion. When I shoot a bumblebee I would feel cheated if I couldn't capture the gold of the pollen she collects, or the hot pink of the flower that lured her. Of course realistic can also overwhelm, like steamy summer heat, making one crave relative cool calm b&w abstraction. Like watching sexy, witty, haunting film noir instead of racing to a crude and redly bloodspattered real life emergency room. Eliot reminded us that humankind cannot bear very much reality. Of course, what I think draws us all so rapt to black and whites is the sense of what's "really" there, hidden beneath the surface. Nature notoriously uses color to mimic, to trick, to camouflage,to distract. Still, I guess there are times when the surface deception of color is freighted w emotion too.

Change my mind a lot, Luther, lately. Like the rabbitting beagles my family raised on a farm for hunters when young, I have a tendency to follow a scent and get lost. Until the sound of the pissed farmer across the street's gunshots (get those damned mutts out of my corn) scared em home again...