[pure-silver]

Why does the exhibition project such a dim vision? Is it impossible for serious contemporary photography to see something better? Is failure and disappointment the real, unavoidable story? Or is it another myth, a paradoxically reassuring narrative to which many high-minded people now unthinkingly accede? If so, what would be the alternative? That could be an unknown worth exploring.
In the NY times article about the exhibit about the West, Ken Johnson asks this very intelligent question.
I've been looking for the alternative now for ten years. My project is to photograph an imperfect, yet beautiful small rural community. I call this idea The Modest Sublime. In it you see how people and nature coexist: you see all the trash, the beer bottles, the plastic buckets, the jerry-rigged cattle watering troughs made out of bathtubs and baling twine, the washing machine that was thrown in the creek, but somehow it looks ok if there is enough honeysuckle and blackberry vines growing over and around it. My friend Geoff Winningham calls Brangus Lane "a cross between the garden of Eden and Sanford and Son."
We have to find a way to live on the earth without totally trashing it. On Brangus Lane, we're trying. 

--shannon




http://shannonstoney-twors.blogspot.com/
http://branguslane.blogspot.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/shannonstoney/

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