PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: This Sharon farmstead lies well with the land, and when I was shooting lots of farms I’d often pass here to see what the light was doing or how the fog was drifting. It seemed to me it must have been built by someone who loved the operations of earth and wind.
It was many years before I finally met the man who owned the farm; it had belonged to his father, some time deceased. He gave me permission to explore and photograph. There were sheds of rusting machine parts and parts with no shed, old motors and workshops left to the squirrels. Somewhere I have the pictures. And there were hills to explore.
I followed a farm road that led down to a ravine and across a stream. I wanted to look back at the farm, see how it met the wind on the other side. Along the path, mounted on a wall where the bank fell away to the stream, were poles supporting ingenious whirligigs: people and animals and windmills made from welded junk and holding pinwheels that turned in the wind spinning gears and fantasies. Like the decaying workshops, the whirligigs were not all working and far from complete. But some still spun as I followed the linkages, there in the curve of the hill where the wind was gently blowing.
*********
I was sure I had posted several images of this farm to my blog, but I only turned up one previous post in 2009: http://rothphotos.blogspot.com/2009/09/bolland-farm-and-hills.html
