While working on my book Common Tide; Port Aransas, Texas, I had a list of things from the Mercer Logs that I wanted to photograph and I was having trouble finding some of those things on today's Mustang Island. Things like gardens, chickens, cattle, horses, and pigs. So I thought that I could spread out my search to the mainland just across the bay from Port Aransas. Contact with county Farm Bureaus gave me the names of some farmers and that is how I found Four String Farm, an organic farm in Rockport, Texas, owned by Justin and Kayla Butts.
I made some photographs that I really liked on the farm of chickens and pigs and the garden and I thought I could slip them into the book but when I started putting the book together I could not include them. The book is about Port Aransas and Mustang Island and Rockport is not on the island. How could I explain a connection to a reader if they asked who has pigs like this or where did you find these chickens?
As much as the questions that I might be asked, the image above told me I could not use the images from Four String Farm. The landscape is different. I have not seen any area of the island that has vegetation like this image. It would not be true to the Mercer Logs from 1866 to 1877. But, I do like this image; the way the light filters through the canopy and you can see back into the tangle of the trees.
I would love to walk a bit further in from where you stood to shoot, sit, and just breathe it in. Listen. Look. Move in. Move out. I can smell things growing, hear faint rustling now and again. But more than anything I hear silence and it has the most to say.
ReplyDeleteWhen can expectant (as in eager, not pregnant) admirers buy the much ballyhooed book? 😃
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