Musings on photography recently talked about the idea of cliché. Below is a country lane that happens to be pregnant with possibility.
Ready to drive to market, we noticed a frog sitting in the lane, gazing off into the distance. As I stepped out of the car, he turned towards me. He scrutinized me as I was slowly approaching him. He held eye-contact with me. Finally, I politely asked him to please hop aside, displaying a more restrained behavior than the original Germanic ‘throwing the frog against the wall in disgust’ or the prettied up American version of ‘kissing the frog’
The frog turned, not into a marriageable person, but, as I very much preferred, into a child. In contemporary American fiction, Paradise Hotel, Dust, it is the children who are enlightened while adults are confused by Love, Lies and Liquor.
Thyme, St. Johnswort with a boy.
Birgit,
You’re not only violating story convention, but also picture convention, by mixing black and white with color images. Of course, the increasing color works well with your tale.
I’m afraid I don’t know your fiction references, but I’m wondering if the children are depicted as enlightened in the sense of consciously knowing, or rather as innocent, seeming to know without consciousness. Your boy looks like a young Pied Piper inviting us to follow to a secret place.
Steve,
Originally, I uploaded the lane in color – bright blue sky framing white clouds, grass very green from the rain and the brilliant yellow of St. John’s Worth. Troels took one look and told me that I was trivializing where we live. Perhaps, he meant that my photo was too much of a cliché. I agreed and hid the brilliant coloration in b+w. I also refrained from dramatising it by increasing the contrast a la A. Adam, showing just a dusty country road.
The fiction references are to 2 novelists/mystery story writers. I think that Martha Grimes depicts children as enlightened beings.
The boy does have a certain look.