Mid-stagger: that is how the wind has left the far tree, trunk tipped, fine twigs streaming, a thin body crossing the ridge against its will. The grass runs rust and copper to the horizon, every blade leaning one way, so the field seems to perform a single long exhalation. Above, the storm opens a pale rift in the grey sky, less a promise than a rumor of one. I recognize this weather at once: it is the weather of waiting.
And yet what holds me is not the storm but the flaw: faint circular blooms drifting over the grass, rain or dust on the glass through which the picture was taken. They hang there, weightless, like breath made visible. At once the landscape stops being out there; it presses against a window, and I am inside with the photographer, close enough to hear the rain begin. A picture that confesses its own skin: this, to me, is tenderness.
The photographer, born in Kent, Ohio, and long settled near San Francisco, has made a life’s work of such weather, photographing roads and fields through the windows of his car, as he photographs suburban houses through the dark. He gives the pictures numbers instead of titles, so nothing intervenes between us and the sensation. SFMOMA, the Getty and the Whitney keep his prints. In this archival pigment print the coppers deepen and the grey stays wet, and the little blooms of rain remain exactly where they fell, which is to say between us and the field.
Mid-stagger: that is how the wind has left the far tree, trunk tipped, fine twigs streaming, a thin body crossing the ridge against its will. The grass runs rust and copper to the horizon, every blade leaning one way, so the field seems to perform a single long exhalation. Above, the storm opens a pale rift in the grey sky, less a promise than a rumor of one. I recognize this weather at once: it is the weather of waiting.
And yet what holds me is not the storm but the flaw: faint circular blooms drifting over the grass, rain or dust on the glass through which the picture was taken. They hang there, weightless, like breath made visible. At once the landscape stops being out there; it presses against a window, and I am inside with the photographer, close enough to hear the rain begin. A picture that confesses its own skin: this, to me, is tenderness.
The photographer, born in Kent, Ohio, and long settled near San Francisco, has made a life’s work of such weather, photographing roads and fields through the windows of his car, as he photographs suburban houses through the dark. He gives the pictures numbers instead of titles, so nothing intervenes between us and the sensation. SFMOMA, the Getty and the Whitney keep his prints. In this archival pigment print the coppers deepen and the grey stays wet, and the little blooms of rain remain exactly where they fell, which is to say between us and the field.