Crapy tomatoes

Or, an inquiry into intention

DEAR EXPOSEUR — Every time I leave the house to take photos, I say to myself, do not take photos of signs. I don't even have to say the second part, because you already know I never listen to myself. I have all these rules I don't follow. I tell myself that being selective and intentional will translate into more compelling photographs. But that's frankly bullshit, and the only intention that matters occurs when you walk out the door with a camera and an open mind.

Recently I found myself in Catonsville, contemplating life under the technicolor glow of Bill's electric visage. Sometimes, when I'm out at night and feeling lost, I go there to sit and look at the big electric guitars flanking the parking lot between the medical equipment store and Bill's Music, and listen to Dire Straits or Pink Floyd, and reminisce about a time when I would sit with a blank cassette in the deck, waiting for the right song to come on the radio, and then frantically pressing 'record.' While the track recorded, I would try to transcribe the lyrics in my looping grade school cursive. By the time I graduated high school I had a mountain of tapes of recorded radio songs — pop to punk to hair metal to rock and roll — the inserts scribbled with my favorite lines. One I recall from a late night in high summer, when the rock DJ knew no one was listening and played the ten-minute jams daytime audiences couldn't tolerate, was from "Sorrow" off Pink Floyd's much-maligned (and undeservedly so) A Momentary Lapse of Reason.

“A man lies and dreams of green fields and rivers
But awakes to a morning with no reason for waking
He’s haunted by the memory of a lost paradise
In his youth, or a dream, he can’t be precise.”

When September rolled around and it was time to go back to school, I'd hide in the honeysuckle bush by the bus stop with my headphones on and my bespoke playlist blaring from my dollar store tape player and dream of returning to summer, while the neighbor kid situated a dead raccoon in the road in hopes the schoolbus would hit it.

More modernly, I find myself enamored with signs for all the things they don't intend to mean.

Cait and Felix came back from the grocery store and told me there was a cool car parked on 40th, that it would make a good night photo. I was feeling a bit done in by car photos — I've made something like two dozen frames of just classic cars in the past month — but I was so excited when I got there that I very nearly hit a fire hydrant while parking. Yes, a cool car on 40th, parked next to a 'one way' sign pointing at a cemetery. What did it mean? Clearly an arrangement of serendipity with no intention to mean anything, and yet, perhaps some meaning to impart for ourselves. All roads lead to our certain deaths. I thanked Cait profusely when I got home, but I don't think she understood my particular jubilation over this memento mori.

Or, speaking of graveyards: I took Owen on a drive to New Freedom to photograph a gun store. Along the way we passed a headstone store. A statue of Jesus stood next to a black-letter marquee that read: MOTHERS HOLD OUR HEARTS FOREVER. A sweet Mother's Day message.

On a recent outing to find a way to photograph the street sign for Cuckold's Point (adjacent to Pleasure Island, in fact), I passed a handmade farm sign that demanded a documenting, despite my internal reluctance to take yet another photo of words.

But while I stood on the side of a farm road outside Essex, the night peepers singing deafening tunes in the night that smelled like cut grass and river water, I thought about how tired I was indeed of crapy tomatoes, and contemplated further the pretense, and the purpose, and felt that the greater reward than creating exactly what you intended is, chiefest of all, making the most of what you didn't.

The intentional photographers know the shot before they raise the camera, and they go home with it. Or, seeing a subject, decide not to photograph it as an act of intention. I could never. Maybe I envy them, a little, for their power of selection. I went out for a gun store and came home haunted by a graveyard and a gas station, unable to say whether what I'd found meant anything at all; a memory of a lost paradise in my youth, or a dream, I can't be precise. I never can.

-mw