HOME GROWN TOMATOES
Photographs speak to the basic sensibility of our trust and mistrust.
Most photographers I know have a sense of adventure searching/looking for a place to make a photograph that affirms their feelings and thoughts about self, their vision and the culture. I was once bold enough to express the thought that, “a photograph is not worth making if you have to leave home to make it.” While the statement is extreme in its point of view, it does express clarity of thought regarding the discovery that making a photograph can be found in the simple elements of any local environment. Vision, in photographic imagery, is the unstructured possibility that we might see. Most of my photographs are made in my yard, house or neighborhood. Within a limited geographic range, I can find many macro/micro spaces in which I can map inside to outside and outside to inside. This is defined as place that gives rise to vision.
The photographs, Home Grown Tomatoes, started as a southern tradition…planting a few tomato plants in the yard for salads or sandwiches with no thought of making a photograph. The natural growth, decay, or insect invasion of the tomato would create specimens so rich in metaphor that leaving home to photograph was unnecessary. I have been told these images are disturbing and not necessarily beautiful. The boundaries between inside and outside, the beautiful and the grotesque, are always in a dynamic tension-giving rise to vision, identity and life.
