A child's bike lies on its side on a plain of cracked, dried mud, and the first thing you want to do is pick it up. That impulse, absurd since the bike has probably lain there for years and is only a photograph anyway, is the whole hook of the picture. Someone rode it to the edge of this muddy pond, dropped it, and wandered off, and the abandonment has hardened into something almost geological, the silt fractured into plates around the wheels.
Stepping stones cross the brown water toward an eroded bank, as if to say the crossing was possible, once, for someone smaller and braver. The whole thing is toned a warm sepia, the soft-cornered square of a cheap plastic camera, which lends it the quality of a memory you're not sure is yours. Silver Meadows, the series is called, and there's a joke in the name I keep circling: nothing here is silver, and the meadow is a drained mudflat.
Printed as archival pigment on aluminium, the surface holds every crack and pebble with a patience the scene hardly seems to deserve, and that mismatch is exactly the point, dignity conferred on a discarded toy. I've looked at a lot of pictures of bikes, and most are about motion. This one is about the moment after motion stops for good, when a thing meant to carry a child becomes a small monument to having been young somewhere unlovely.
A child's bike lies on its side on a plain of cracked, dried mud, and the first thing you want to do is pick it up. That impulse, absurd since the bike has probably lain there for years and is only a photograph anyway, is the whole hook of the picture. Someone rode it to the edge of this muddy pond, dropped it, and wandered off, and the abandonment has hardened into something almost geological, the silt fractured into plates around the wheels.
Stepping stones cross the brown water toward an eroded bank, as if to say the crossing was possible, once, for someone smaller and braver. The whole thing is toned a warm sepia, the soft-cornered square of a cheap plastic camera, which lends it the quality of a memory you're not sure is yours. Silver Meadows, the series is called, and there's a joke in the name I keep circling: nothing here is silver, and the meadow is a drained mudflat.
Printed as archival pigment on aluminium, the surface holds every crack and pebble with a patience the scene hardly seems to deserve, and that mismatch is exactly the point, dignity conferred on a discarded toy. I've looked at a lot of pictures of bikes, and most are about motion. This one is about the moment after motion stops for good, when a thing meant to carry a child becomes a small monument to having been young somewhere unlovely.