Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Wooden Clock


Today during a lull in the homecoming celebration for Mabel Watson Payne, I asked her mother (my daughter) if I could take a picture of the wooden clock she gave to her husband for their 5th wedding anniversary last spring. I remembered the occasion of buying the wooden clock, when it was my job to divert my son-in-law's attention from the fact that my daughter was buying him an anniversary present. (I used an elaborate ruse involving cupcakes.) But today the wooden clock refused to be nicely photographed. It would only consent to let one end of itself be photographed, in company with a white pottery horse standing in front of a watercolor landscape. Personally, I am truly satisfied with this photograph of the wooden clock (my whole notion of photography being passive, that the photographer's job is always to inquire and never to command) except that no mere viewer of the photograph would be able to tell what it is without being told. Without being told, everybody would think it was a photograph of a pottery horse.