Bare Branches No. 1 ~ Fall 2009
Whatever precautions you take so the photograph will look like this or that, there comes a moment when the photograph surprises you. It is the other’s gaze that wins out and decides.
Jacques Derrida
The weather is turning. Leaves that only a few weeks ago were bright orange, red, yellow and brown have fallen to the ground leaving the branches of the trees barren, awaiting the first hint of snow. Winter is on its way and the world in Northeastern Illinois is becoming bleak. I can never get used to the cold, the constant gray skies, the wind, and the snow covering the ground (quickly turning into the overcast color of the sky). I detest Winter. This is the season with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Please take no offense if you think Winter is the Nuts! Just because I would rather not scrape snow off my windshield doesn’t mean that you are not welcome to do so to your hearts content. For me, I can’t ever dress for the cold and stay warm but I know I never have to dress for the Summer in heavy, layered garments. So if you like Winter, skiing, dog sledding, snowmobiling and the like my best to you. I’ll stay indoors until March 15th as much as humanly possible.
In Northeastern Illinois, where I live, the sky has been overcast for the past five days. Three of those days brought rain along with the clouds. The outside temperature never rose above 45 degrees, just slightly above the temperature of the inside of my refrigerator. With the wind it felt even colder outside. So what is a photographer to do? When I let the dogs out in the yard for their morning constitutional, my eye caught the top of our Japanese Lilac tree now denuded of its leaves. Silhouetted against the uniformly gray sky, the tree spoke to me of the isolation, the desolation of the season to come. I reached for my camera and snapped off a few shots of just the top of the tree. The result is the image in this post (and probably one or two more to come).
The image speaks to me of isolation, of the short days and deprived sensory input in the Midwest during the Winter months. It speaks to me of the depression of the cold, the inevitable ice patches on the driveway, the constant inundation of Holiday commercials on the television starting weeks before Thanksgiving (am I the only one for whom this is a travesty that diminishes the importance of the Thanksgiving holiday?) I could rant on, but I will let the image do the talking for me. I think it would be better if I didn’t like this image so much.
The Bare Branches No. 1 ~ Fall 2009 by Roger Passman, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
