When I started working on this series and shared test shots with folks around me, a few eyebrows rose and a couple people politely expressed confusion about how stuff growing in ditches became the subject of a photography project. When put that way it does sound a little weird, so if you had the same reaction as my courteous and bewildered friends and coworkers, here’s the long backstory of why I’m crawling into ditches:
A good friend of mine is a passionate promoter of the arts and rural Iowa communities, and she’s involved in the Southwest Iowa Art Tour (held Sept. 21-22 this year). When she asked cleeeaaaaaaarrrrrrr back in March if I was interested in applying to exhibit at the tour this year, I said sure! That would be the motivation I needed to pursue a purely personal photography project, which I’d been wanting to do for quite a while but, you know, life just gets in the way unless you have a hard deadline.
So presto, hard deadline acquired. But I wasn’t worried, not at all, because I had been mulling over a concept for a project for a good long time and it was a Great Idea: to create and photograph uniquely Midwestern mandalas made from found natural objects, like snail shells and acorns and ferns and leaves and grasses! It would be great! Just great!
And it was great – just great! – until I actually tried it. Turns out there’s a lot of variation in the size, and shape, and color of natural objects (how did I not see that coming?). To successfully make mandalas, you need to find at least four of each component that are darn near identical. And nature really isn’t into creating identical stuff. And my orderly German sensibility really isn’t cool with creating less than perfectly symmetrical mandalas.
I did my first mandala shoot in late April, when the woods were waking up from winter and spring greenery emerged. I … umm … wasn’t super happy with it but convinced myself that this was just a learning curve problem and I’d be better at creating mandalas in no time.
So I tried again.
And again.
And by the fourth shoot it was clear that the problem wasn’t located on the learning curve. My mandala concept was a disaster, and I was one more mandala shoot away from a creative and emotional meltdown.
The art tour was only three months away and I was back to square one … and smarting from the sting of failure … and genuinely, deeply not loving the hard deadline that seemed like such a good idea in March.
The good news is that sometimes (this was one of those times!) failure pushes a person toward clarity. It was time to take stock of my objective and what was available to work with: I wanted to do something with natural materials from the Loess Hills, approach it from an angle that hadn’t been tried before, and experiment with a different light setup than I was used to; I had access to, well, the Loess Hills and everything I saw on my drive into town, which included miles of ditches.
As luck would have it, the elderberry bushes in those ditches had started blooming and caught my eye on the way home that day … and they set me to thinking. A quick Google image search for “elderberry flower” didn’t turn up a single image that had been shot in a studio. Hmmm, thought I, and searched for “milkweed flower.” There were plenty of outdoor photos, but not in the style I was starting to picture in my mind. “Wild mustard?” A few studio results, but none with dramatic lighting.
Aha.
And that’s how the ditch flower project idea came into being. A helpful friend, excitement, hubris, failure, discovery, back to excitement and (hopefully) redemption. It’s like a Homerian epic writ very, very small.
If you’d like to see the product of this epic in person, and fancy a drive through rural southwest Iowa, please to stop by Impact Hill in Oakland on Sept. 21-22 and visit my booth at the Southwest Iowa Art Tour. I’d love to meet you and we can share a chuckle about the strange places creativity and failure will lead a person to. And then please visit the other stops on the tour too – your mind will be blown by the talent of this year’s showcased artists!
