The rural landscape is eerily beautiful to me, in part because it is rarely presented in a truthful way. If you see a beautiful farm up here – Bedlam Farm too – you know that a real farmer doesn’t live there. Real farmers, like real animals, do not live pastoral, beautiful, well-organized and trouble free lives. Their farms never make it onto calendars and postcards. Real farms are spare, dirty, almost never repaired and there is a powerful beauty in their stark landscapes. They are almost all de-nuded – animals live in mud and destroy grass, the buildings open to the elements and hanging on, all kinds of equipment scattered everywhere, homemade fences barely upright.

I have come to love the true nature of the rural landscape, in my photography I see it as beautiful, evocative, poignant. Every real farm is a struggle, the struggle is the emotion I always seek in my photos. I felt it today on Route 68 near Vermont. I passed this farm and then pictured this very photo 20 miles later and turned around and came back.