Patterns and Standards

There was a run of days in the high 90’s that kept us indoors during the middle of the day. The old hay barn we live in was built with thick stone walls which kept the interior cool despite the blazing Tuscan sun. By late afternoon we’d saunter outside to sit under the dappled light of the Leccio tree, the only place where something like cool air could be found.

We had two, sling-like, canvas deck chairs, called sdraio which we slung ourselves into, and dazed from the heat stared off into space. Above me the tree became a Japanese screen with infinite brush strokes of black and green which shivered in the slightest breeze or eddy of heat rising from the baked and stony earth. On many of those late afternoons I daydreamed there, and often saw through the breaks in the tree, small celestial comments floating by, like the way atmosphere lends a pearly, pinkish weight to summer clouds.

I probably wouldn’t have noticed something like this and made a photograph of it (but then my inner voice says, ‘oh, Joel, but you have, and in many different ways’) but since this project began I have many times considered things that I might have let let slip by under other circumstances. It is part of the pleasure of this kind of daily shooting discipline, that modest, often overlooked moments come into play in this way. It’s good to shake up our patterns and the standards which we hold so dear.