Freeman's Meadow

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: I have several reasons for changing the name of this not quite daily scrawl. First, "journal" more accurately reflects the way I have come to regard these pages; a place to jot down thoughts and musings of many kinds that flow from weekly shoots. No change in content: recipes, reports and ruminations from my photographic odyssey. The name change comes now to leave a mark that here the hard drive failure has led me to review old files and take stock. Where has this odyssey traveled?

I came out of the woods in the spring of 2005 - gave up mushrooms, tree toads, and indian pipe for the openness of the meadow. When it happened I was standing at the edge of an old pasture shooting toward a bolted-iron windmill out in the field. As I set up the shot - stone wall, vines and branches leading the eye to the windmill - just then the light changed and there was a Monet moment that fired up the branch. Thereafter, walking the tall grass I saw painterly textures of all kinds, many more than I had seen in the deep woods where there's no room for the light to spread out.

This photograph was made in the gardens of Freeman Patterson the following spring (2006). The painterly textures of the meadow have been drawing Freeman's lens for many years. In the fields that stretch from his house down to the loch in New Brunswick, he has encouraged a wild meadow of myriad surprises. The sun rises early behind his house and sets far away across the water. The meadow produces an ever changing palette from which he makes photographs of great beauty. As students in his workshop we were lucky to be able to play in his garden. I'd completely forgotten this photo and was pleased to rediscover it this week.