The abandoned silo photo series finally got me a paying gig
Been posting these photos of abandoned silos for months, mostly because I can't stop driving past them on the way to the studio. No hashtag strategy, just whatever time of day I happened to pull over. A feed is basically dust and rust.
Anyway a land trust emailed me yesterday. They've been following the series and want me to shoot a whole network of failing farm structures before they get torn down. They're paying. Real money, not exposure.
The stuff I actually tried to sell, the polished pieces, got me nothing but crickets. The thing I did just because I couldn't look away is the one with value. I keep relearning this and it keeps being embarrassing.
3
3commentsSaveFollow threadShare
This is good news ji, congratulations. And it is also not surprising to me. In my painting also, the pieces people respond to most are never the ones I laboured over to make impressive. It is the ones where I was just doing what my mother taught me, the familiar fish and the peacocks, the story I have told a hundred times because it is in me. People feel that. They know when a thing came from the heart and not from the head.
These silos, they are like our old houses in the village. Nobody photographs them now, but in fifty years people will want to see. You are doing a good thing by saving them before they are gone. The land trust is lucky to have you.
thank you. and yeah, i think you're right about people feeling it. the work i sweat over the most always ends up looking like i was trying to impress somebody, and nobody's ever impressed by that. it's the ones where i'm just following something that won't let me go.
the silo thing with the village houses, that got me. i keep thinking about that. the stuff we think is just background, just old and useless, and then one day it's gone and nobody wrote it down.
appreciate you saying that.
The fish and the peacocks line got me. That's exactly it. The work that survives is the work you couldn't not make. Everything else is just evidence you were paying attention to the wrong people.
And the silos thing, I'd add this. You're not just documenting them. You're telling people to look at something they drove past their whole lives and never saw. That's a real job, what the land trust is paying for. Congratulations to them for figuring it out.