photo: jetheriot
I have a block of wood I use as a pedestal to pose stuff on and photograph, a prop that’s interesting to look at, but not so interesting that it gets in the way of whatever is posed on top of it. It’s a cross section of an old cypress post I pulled from the scrap pile of my dad’s work shed. It’s dotted with holes: natural wood holes and holes made by nails. Five of its six sides are sawn smooth. The sixth side is rough with chunky splinters.
Last night, as I was falling asleep, I thought of an old toy sheep I keep in the top drawer of my toybox. I always use the few minutes it takes me to fall asleep as an opportunity to think about some small detail of a project I’m working on – what color backdrop to shoot a hand-puppet video against, for example, or what size smiley face to use for a sticker project – and last night’s topic was how to pose that little plastic sheep to make the most dream-like photograph possible. In my dimming mind, I placed it on a field of black felt and let an unspooled length of white thread drop loosely in coils around it. Then I dreamed of guitars and picnics.
Last night, as I was falling asleep, I thought of an old toy sheep I keep in the top drawer of my toybox. I always use the few minutes it takes me to fall asleep as an opportunity to think about some small detail of a project I’m working on – what color backdrop to shoot a hand-puppet video against, for example, or what size smiley face to use for a sticker project – and last night’s topic was how to pose that little plastic sheep to make the most dream-like photograph possible. In my dimming mind, I placed it on a field of black felt and let an unspooled length of white thread drop loosely in coils around it. Then I dreamed of guitars and picnics.
The thread idea didn’t pan out – the thread looked more threadlike than dreamlike – so I decided to just stand the sheep up on my trusty block of wood, turning the wood-block around in my hand first to find the flattest, smoothest side. Wanting to conceal the one minor flaw in the surface, a small and deep natural wood hole, I posed the sheep so that its white barrel-shaped mid-section would eclipse the hole when viewed from the perspective of the camera. As far as the photograph would be concerned, the hole never existed. Even if I had to Photoshop it out later, the flaw would never be seen. The hole would disappear.
But the sheep fell. Then it fell again. The block of wood was just crooked enough, and the old toy was just unstable enough, that no matter how precisely I positioned its two pairs of rotatable black legs with regard to each other, the sheep kept falling down. I considered getting my egg of Silly Putty out of the toybox and pinching off four small pieces the size of a grain of rice, one for each of the sheep’s hooves, to secure the wobbly sheep to the wood, but decided to step back and reappraise the situation instead, recognizing that I was headed in the wrong direction, falling into a hole and digging myself deeper. I was bumping up against a dead end.
“What if I embraced the flaw instead?” I thought. “Would that send me on a different journey, a less congested route? Instead of trying to hide the hole, what if I called attention to it? What if I put the hole center stage? Better yet . . . what if I used the hole to stick the sheep’s legs into?” The sheep’s rear legs fit snugly in the hole. I couldn’t have made a more perfect hole if I’d tried. Its front legs reached up to the sky, and when I scissored them slightly, the about-to-leap sheep took on a gleeful aura. And the sheep’s front legs fit snugly in the hole too: now the sheep was finishing its leap, permanently frozen in motion, landing on his two front hooves. Leaning into what I thought was a flaw in the wood, instead of trying to conceal it, brought out a beauty in the sheep I wouldn’t have discovered had I just airbrushed the hole away.