Payment plan

I'm a chronic photographer. If I'm walking around I need to be making photographs or I get restless. A lot of times I'll force a photo to happen when it really shouldn't, just to sate my habit. What this means is that I wind up taking a lot of shitty photographs, like this one from last week for example.


I shot this in a park in Corvallis while waiting for this photo show to open. Although there may have been a potential photograph in this scene I didn't get it. I wasn't patient enough or not in the right spot or missed the moment. I'm not sure. All I know is I wound up with yet another stillborn image. It wouldn't even be worth reproducing here if not for what happened next.

I walked around some more, checked out the show, bought a funny used book, and drove home. Tab had stacked my mail on my desk with the New Yorker on top.


Strange! Although the details are hard to discern in the photo, the statues are extremely similar. The same pose, the same bare limbs, the same round pedestal. To encounter this twice in one day was downright weird.

What does it mean beyond that? I'll probably never know, but it's reaffirmed my sense that there is a strange order to things not easily understood. We catch glimpses of it here and there, and occasionally our photographs can capture it and show it to us if we are receptive.

Pay attention to what you see. That's the lesson. Photographers above all others, pay attention.