“Big Yellow Taxi”

The song by Joni Mitchell contains the much quoted line “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”.

Every time I came back from town I passed within a couple of metres of “County”, a small, old and battered, tracked bulldozer / tractor. For many years she has been there gradually deteriorating in summer sun, rain and winter snow. When I met Fukuhara-san, the owner, he said proudly that the engine still fired up and ran.

Then one day a couple of weeks ago she was gone.

Of course I miss her. I have been photographing her for years watching the paint gradually peel and rust expand, admiring her quiet strength and resilience, watching the weeds grow and engulf her more each year. But fortunately I have memories of her on film and in data files. The last photo I took of her was only a few weeks ago when I was testing my ME Supers, unfortunately only B&W and on film I don’t particularly like but at least I have her final farewell.

So what’s my point?

Exactly what Joni sang: there may be a particular object, building or even person we pass or see regularly, something just a little beyond the ordinary that attracts our attention, one day it’ll be gone and it will be too late to make a record. If something gets your attention regularly, record it, record how it relates to the environment around it, find out why it attracts your attention. This is something I failed to do – “County” attracted my attention enough to use it as a test subject when I was trying out different films, cameras or lenses, but I failed to find out something about its history, why it was there and how or why it related to the other objects around it. If something is worth photographing, a photograph may be worth a thousand words but it doesn’t tell the complete story. This is something I am very bad at, often I’m just collecting an image, and I suspect many other photographers are like me. In many cases that is sufficient, but not all. We deserve to give the unusual, anything that is unusual enough to grab our attention or become part of our daily lives, not just a photograph but a story. Fill in the ‘how’, ‘why’, ‘when’ etc., and make a documentary about the object, then something meaningful will remain when the object has gone. I’ll try to listen to my own advice in future!

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