I’ve known for a couple of weeks that my photography project called “Wrought” was soon to end. I set the timeframe of frost-to-frost — that is, I began photographing scenes right after the first “safe” frost-free date for my area of eastern Missouri. Around the first week of May. I envisioned, lo those many months ago, that I would end after the first hard freeze of the fall of 2021. There’s been some light, spotty frosts, but none here on Snob Hill, so I kept shooting.
I had a Truman Capote moment this morning. I poured my first cup of coffee and looked out the kitchen window and a voice in my head said, literally, “Today’s the day to end it.” This was a Capote moment because it reminds me of one of the opening scene in “A Christmas Memory” when : “Imagine a morning in late November …A woman with shorn white hair is standing at the kitchen window. “Oh my,” she exclaims, her breath smoking the windowpane, “it’s fruitcake weather!”
So it was this morning. I had small panics last weekend as I thought about the end of this project. It has consumed me almost daily since I began. Yet, I worried — seriously worried — that I hadn’t shot enough (whatever that means) and/or what it what I had shot wasn’t good enough and/or would there be enought time to make the remaining images I envisioned. I captured some scenes last weekend and a couple during the week. This morning, my plans were to work through the honey-do list I have to complete before guests arrive next weekend.
Then I had the fruitcake moment. I agreed with the voice in my head. I folded the honey-do list and within a few minutes I was schlepping gear from my basement office to the front yard. It was the perfect overcast sky that I love to shoot under. I told my wife of my plans and assured her I could complete the images in a hour or so.
Four hours later, I dropped the proverbial mike.
So, now it’s done. I’m a bit disoriented. Sure, there’s black and white film to develop and color rolls and sheets to send to the lab, but that voice keeps coming back. This time with, “It’s over. It’s really over.” I should be pleased that I have completed my first true photo project — one conceived of specifically as a series of still lifes taken during the sprouting-growing-dying seasons here on Snob Hill. I feel a bit like someone — or something — has died.
Only the image-making portion of this project is done. I rationally know that. I have many months ahead of me culling through the work, editing, making prints, and sequencing will all be new experiences for me as a first-time photo project creator. Then there will be deciding if there’s enough strong work — and eventually text, too — to warrant making a book and landing a solo exhibition (another first, if I get one).
I am proud that I finished this project. I probably don’t even know exactly what I have. That will be exciting and challenging.
Yet, right now, it’s a bittersweet feeling. It was time to wrap things up (it is lightly sleeting as I write this, not exactly a hard frost but, let’s say, frost-equivalent. A gift of good light and bad weather tonight. Message received, ye photo gods.
I can’t help feeling like the narrator in Capote’s story at the end: “…A message saying so merely confirms a piece of news some secret vein had already received, severing from me an irreplaceable part of myself, letting it loose like a kite on a broken string.”