Sometimes, when I take a photo, I step out of myself. I look at the image, and wonder what this would look like to me if I didn’t know the people in the photo and just saw them from a distance and for the first time.

In this photo, I see a scene that is somehow both poignant and  uplifting at the same time. I see an older man – judging from the walking stick and the hat and shirt, and an older dog, a sheep dog perhaps.

The two are back from the sheep, and that is the poignant part.

They are not a part of things, they seem to be watching from a distance, and yet they look comfortable, as if they belong  by that gate looking out at the pasture. They look content with one another, that is the uplifting part.

I wonder what they are watching. The sheep are just grazing. There is something meditative about the image. But it seems as if the sheep are a part of things, a part of them, that everything in the photograph is where it belongs, where it lives.

The older man seems to carry the stick for effect, he stands straight enough, he doesn’t seem to be leaning on it. He just seems like man who carries a walking stick. The dog seems unusually calm for a sheep dog, and patient. He exudes confidence and authority, but he is, like the man, somehow detached.

Perhaps there is nothing for them to do.

Perhaps there is nothing they can do.

The two seem quite content to be standing alongside one another, as if they do it all the time There is no discomfort or anxiety between them. They don’t need to look at each other or talk to each other.  I am struck by the man’s white straw Panama Hat, it seems unusual on a farm with sheep.

He doesn’t look like a farmer, perhaps this is why he is standing outside of the fence.

I get the sense that they work together all of the time, they almost seem to be a unit, one thing, not two. They seem to be home.

The dog seems intent on the sheep, I think he is a sheepdog. Yet there is something tentative about the two of them, something detached, as if they are just watching..