I found this pair of empty carts outside the Food Lion on Waughtown Street, the one next to Prodigals Community where I've been teaching this month. This twosome appeared during a mini field trip of sorts. I was walking around the block with my students, seven men who are in recovery from addiction to drugs or alcohol, sometimes both.
It was our second class together when we left campus, heading out to explore the neighborhood, looking for images that reflected one of the twelve steps. As we entered the grocery store parking lot, two drunk men walked by; they were loud, chatting nonsense, staggering a little left and right. That was an interesting moment, all things considered.
And then we spotted this twosome by the side of the store. Look, there's a pair for you, one of the men pointed. There's one.
During our first class, I'd shown a few twosome images. I wanted to share with them the fine art of seeing something fun in this overwhelming world of ours. It wasn't a big part of what we discussed, though. We'd looked at dozens of images, seeing how to use light and metaphor and yourself in photography. So, anyway, I felt pretty excited to discover they were into this twosome concept; they not only got it, they saw it too.
I grabbed one of the point and shoots from a student and began photographing the two empty metal carts. I loved them diagonally parked together against the brick wall and the yummy contrast of the blue plastic against the rust concrete. I also loved the little red plastic on the right back wheel, and the way they seemed to sigh with the end of things, a journey over, a job done. It was a minimalist, slightly despairing landscape a la Robert Adams.
This image seems to be about emptiness, but for me, it contains so much more than that.
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