Hay for Sale

JOHN SZARKOWSKI: "Painting was difficult, expensive and precious, and it recorded what was known to be important. Photography was easy, cheap and ubiquitous, and it recorded anything: shop windows and sod houses and family pets and steam engines and unimportant people. And once made objective and permanent, immortalized in a picture, these trivial things took on importance."

I shot this photo in February during one of the big storms. I'd passed it hundreds of times before, but I never thought to take a picture. I posted a number of shots from that storm shoot, and this one was always in the "almost" category, but it got cycled onto my desktop periodically, and each time it came up I liked it more. In late March I even edited it for TODAY'S. At that time I experimented with removing the electric wire, but the space above the barn looked too empty. It was set and ready to go on April 1 with the wire, but again something else nudged it aside, and it fell to the back of the pack. I exhibited it with The Camera's Eye in May, but it attracted little attention, I think. I wish I fully understood my attraction to the image.

Last night an ice storm passed across Connecticut (as well as much of the rest of the country), and this morning all the branches to their outermost limbs were glazed and crusted with ice. It could have been a photogenic moment. Instead, I went to the mall and post this.