I see the county fair as something of a dream, a mix of family, love, animals, tradition, smells and light and color and sound. Much of the fair is a cheap and low-end kind of shopping and tacky food and carnival court, but it’s heart and soul are the agricultural barns, where the kids who work all year with their cows come to compete and show off their skills.
This young woman did all right in the competition, she was happy walking her cow out of the ring and out of the fair for another year. This photo captured the feel of the place for me, it is like a slow motion camera in a way.
They call them family farms for a good reason, they are all about family, they could not exist without family. The closeness and connection and love of these farm families for one another is profound, and a wonder to me. My family was anything but close, but at the county fair you see the farm families come together in the most visible and beautiful way.
They eat together, sleep together, talk to one another, support and console one another. They come to the county fair in their trailers and sometimes sleep on blankets and sleeping bags close to the barn so they can be with their cows. In the barns, in between the shows and competitions, friends and cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents and neighbors all gather to talk, play cards and games, eat and gossip.
The family farms are dying, so I suppose these kinds of fairs and family gatherings are dying also. We don’t talk politics much, but I know almost every one of these families are supporters of the President. They feel everyone else has abandoned them, and they feel he speaks directly to them, even if they joke that he speaks and tweets too much.
I feel very close to these people, and yet I could hardly be more different. They are good and kind to me, and they always let me take their photos, and I thank them for that.
I love the sense of family this photo conveys in part because of its soft focus.
At the county fair, I love to sit and linger and watch and listen, because I know one day soon we will not see this. More and more kids are foregoing the rigors of 4-H for Facebook and a different, more lucrative and easier way of life. One with a future.
I was walking through a cow barn at the Washington County Fair this afternoon when I saw this young woman napping with her cow. They were very sweet together, and she graciously agreed to let me take her picture.
For the 4-H kids, the Washington County Fair is winding down. The cows have been penned up in stalls for nearly a week now, and they are getting grumpy and restless and a little stir-crazy. The kids work hard to keep them upright and moving and quelling rebellions. I think the 4-H competitions are the best part of the fair.
The cows and the kids are surrounded by a sea of junk food and junk carnie games. They are both refreshing and inspiring. Ed Gulley says when he was a kid, he and his friends would all go out at night and set all of the cows free, then watch the mad scramble as everyone raced around to get them back in their stalls.
Sometimes, he said, they switched the cows around, putting them in stalls where they didn’t belong. The good old days, said Ed, chuckling.
This portrait of Fate was taken with a new and experimental art lens, the Daguerreotype Achromat, 2.9/64, a modern version of the first optical lens used in photography in the early 1800s. It creates what critics call an “otherwordly” affect, or put differently, a sense of magic and dreaming. I’m just learning how to use it, but so far, I like it. it is very different, very distinctive from digital photography in some ways.
