It took a drive across the country for me to reappraise what was close to home. Maybe it's also a positive effect of having been confined for so long that one's eye scans the fields and verges differently. I went out today to photograph the things in my mind. Below are just three images from this morning, made black and white, the contrast turned up to reveal their textures.
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So why take more photographs when I have some perfectly good material? And yet more images of grass! I suppose these images are about familiarity, but also there is something in these fields that chimes with the times we are living through. They are fields full of leavings, with no sign of new activity. Unlike the Nevada fields there's no fecundity here, no joy or promise, yet. The fields are dry and waiting, the only seeming optimism in their story, the freedom of wildlife to live unhindered.
Springing to mind too were Anselm Kiefer's paintings and Kurt Jackson's The Long Field project in which he used Helen Dunmore's poem Crossing the Field. The Russian proverb To live your life is not as simple as to cross a field prefaces this poem. Also there in the mix is the Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki who photographed dead flowers. He talked about lost time, each image he took representing an instant caught between the past and the future.
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