Here's a link to the photos, first of all. I was having trouble figuring out how to put a slideshow on here:
Urban Argriculture
I'll have to be honest, when I first set out to take these pictures, I didn't really have a particular theme in mind. I kind of just decided to go for it and see what happened. To my pleasant surprise, the theme I was apparently searching for just happened to take shape on it's own volition. I love it when life works out that way. I've included a lot more than ten, but seeing as how this was our first presentation I just decided to post all the ones I thought were worth keeping and get your guys' opinions on them. From there, I plan to narrow this collection down a little bit, and maybe even go out and take some more.
Before I even decided on a theme, I knew I wanted to try my best to keep a sense of symmetry and order. The formal structuring of the photos helps to convey more of a sense of how farming, once a messy, work-with-your-hands job, is being transformed into more and more a corporate business, rather than one which is privately owned. The symmetrical ordering helped to conjure up the thought-out structural formalities that you might find in a city blueprint, as opposed to the more chaotic blueprint of nature. This sort of rigidly planned aspect I think helped to offer a nice tension for the context of a pastoral world that is not rigidly planned at all.
The reason I've called this collection Urban Agriculture is because what I see going on in these photos resembles the tension that occurs when urban environments intrude into that of the pastoral, especially in the business of agriculture. Our romantic vision of a typical farm setting usually consists of an ideal world with bright red barns, quaint wooden fences, and clothing hanging out on the line. It's where chickens are not cooped up, cattle roam freely through the pasture, and farmer John still works with plow in hand as he sows seeds that have never heard of pesticides or Monsanto products. However, we know that this often not the case. As the world grows larger we see a blurring of the line between urban and rural, in so far as the rural landscape is becoming almost an extension of it's urban twin, both in look and in lifestyle. Grain silos grow taller and larger as companies begin to take control. Silos start looking more like rural skyscrapers as a fast-growing nation quickly reaches a sustainability breaking point. What was once a symbol of abundance and prosperity is now a symbol of poverty and better days, as graffiti begins to declare war on the sides of walls. It reminds us now, instead, of a standard of life we have set for ourselves that is reaching a point of excess and unsustainability. It's all machinated. For once, there is now a man-made boundary that exists between agriculture and nature, and one can start to see more resemblances of an urban environment.
The first thought, "Where in the hell is this??"
ReplyDeleteI'm curious about this place and, even though you had more than 10 photos, I feel like it wasn't enough.
I dig the various angles you chose, even of the same part of the building. You have created a symmetry that's beautiful.
So, uncertain of the rules on reading your discussion, I did anyway. Rebel, I know.
It interested me when you said, "...I think these photos really speak to how that is slowly starting to change with..." When I look at your collection as a whole, I see an abandoned, rusted, aged building that--for all I know--could be empty. Don't get me wrong; I get where you're coming from. I just feel like maybe this is a middle phase in the rural to urban transition.
I was struck by these photos immediately. My home town (now a bustling suburb)was only about 80 years ago a quiet little farming community that looked shockingly like an artists rendition of sleepy hollow. Now, you cannot throw a latte without smacking into a hummer or escalade. The old photos of my hometown still hold resonance with modern day Bozeman, here in Montana we have not yet taken the ride to serious urbanization but we now have a starbucks. the images i would get from this collection as a whole would freeze my conception of my hometown around 1940-ish, and that period was never truly captured and it is fascinating to see.
ReplyDeleteKenny, I just realized I already commented on your piece! There's nothing really new I have to add to the previous, except to ask: do you plan on sticking with something along these lines for the final draft? Or perhaps are you going to create something different? (For the record, I think what you have here is just fine; I'm just curious and nosey.)
ReplyDeleteHi Kenny –
ReplyDeleteI really like the photographs you took. There is an intentionality to them that I find extremely effective, and they are striking and evocative on their own. I also like the reflection on them in your essay.
The draft you have up here is pretty old at this point, and it might be a little work-a-day walking through your process and your intention. Also, your writing seems to focus on the modernity of urban agriculture, but your pictures have an element of decay and entropy within them, one that sort of pull against the up-to-dateness of the ideas in your writing. There’s nothing wrong intrinsically with that difference, but it suggests something about the historical process of urban agriculture, which is, this isn’t a new phenomenon, that perhaps even the imagined visions we have of the pastoral are constructions that have long shaded the more corporate model you suggest here. Your pictures are about patterns too – shapes and lines and processes. Will you explore this more intentionally in the piece you write?
I guess my suggestion is to head back into these pictures and develop an essay that feels less like an explanation of the pictures (which ends up, in my mind, limiting the pictures more than you need to – think of the ways that the clas responded to them when we looked through them) and more of a companion piece, something that pulls on and plays with the energy and ideas in the pictures. I really am enjoying the way you write, the way you trust that something will come that you have no sense of yet. That trust is a vital part of a generative writing process, because it takes so long, sometimes, for that “something” to show up, and we have to believe that it will. Your writing suggests the energy and power of that belief.
I’m not reponding to the particulars of this draft, because I think you’ll push it in directions that would make those particulars unhelpful. But let me know if you have more questions.
Kirk