The Mount Vernon derelict house; Cornell College football; the Kansas City zoo; and photos from the Mount Vernon watertower

Some contact sheets have a great story behind them.  Some have several.  Some have none.

This contact sheet is from at least five photographic events.

I remember finding the derelict house west of Mount Vernon.  There was a lane leading out to a farm and this house to the side.  I had never been in a totally abandoned house before.  It raised all sorts of questions for me, and the biggest was ‘how did this happen?’  That’s a strange question given that all that happened was nothing else.  Entropy.  Decay.  Someone stopped caring for the house, whether out of poverty or disinterest.  Walk away, and this happens.  To a house.

These photos of the wrecked house also show my continued interest in chaos and order.  My most pleasant photographic challenge is to look at a disordered world and see a composed photograph.  An abandoned house is very chaotic.  I was trying to see good photographs in that mess.  I continue to try.  I’m getting better at seeing and feeling the time and place.  Lately the chaos has been from plant structures – bramble and weeds – not wrecks.

Football photography was another favorite challenge.  Here the chaos moved quickly.  I’ve tried to create photographs with movement and moment.  My model was Henri Cartier Bresson and the decisive moment.  Football staged many such decisive moments on the field.  My fun was to try to catch the right time.  Now photojournalists shoot video and choose the favorite frame.  As I’ve elaborated on elsewhere, by the time you see the moment it has passed.  You need to work on seeing it before it arrives.  Go buy my book on Zen and photography.

The animal photographs are from the Kansas City zoo.  I think.  Maybe from the Milwaukee zoo?  Those were the only two I viewed in that decade.  I don’t remember the occasion.  I think it was Kansas City, because I remember using the photograph of the ape in the tree in a photographic exhibition at Cornell.  I traded it with Mary Blue for a batik she did on a surplus US Navy white gob shirt.  I left the shirt when I outgrew it 40 years ago.

There are photos from the water tower in both fall and winter.  I don’t remember why I climbed the tower on any particular day.  I do remember using it as a personal challenge.  Was I brave enough?  I used to compete with my cousin Kenny to see who could jump from the highest part of the hayloft down into the hay.  Neither of us would concede and it was the barn height that limited our climb.  I would put on shoes that wouldn’t slide on the steel ladder or catwalk.  I would lift and set only one limb at a time.  Hand up off the ladder and grasp a new hold.  Then I would lift a foot and set it higher.  And then the other hand.

It got particularly scary the last 10 feet of the climb.  For most of the climb, the ladder leaned it at the angle of the tower’s leg.  For the last little bit it went up perpendicular to the ground.  That meant I was actually leaning back out over the leg while making that last climb up and over to the catwalk.  It gives me a buzz now just thinking of it.  And then the view.  Remarkable.  The wind.  The birds flying around.  I tried to be invisible so that I wouldn’t have to talk with Police Chief Earl Wolvers.

The climb back down was even scarier.  You had to swing your leg back out over space, and set it down where you weren’t going to look, while leaning backwards.  Slowly, one hand, one leg at a time I climbed the ladder back down.

I stopped climbing the watertower when I realized I had no good explanation to give as to why I did it, if something were to go wrong.

I don’t think I’d do it again.

The photos referred to in this essay can be found in the Photos by Numbers galleries # 00032.