The Monochrome Chronicles #35: The Rooster’s Nest

This episode of The Monochrome Chronicles strays outside the usual boundaries of my photography. These images seem to be outside of time. The palette is soft and resides in middle gray, rather than my usual dark and high contrast palette. More important is the concept. For this I have to go far back in time to my teenage years, the 1960s, a farm in Iowa, an imaginary cafe in our town. This was the Rooster’s Nest, a storefront place where people would drop by late in the afternoon for doughnuts and coffee, and gossip. The foibles of their neighbors would be the daily topic. I cannot chronicle the stories from the Rooster’s Nest, but I can show you how the spirit of the place has crept into my photography.

Only now in the 21^st century have I come to recognize the spirit of the Rooster’s Nest hidden in some of my photographs from the last 30 years. The negatives, especially the earliest ones, had resided in my archives, unseen for nearly 20 years. The negatives were out of sight, yes, but the spirit of the Rooster’s Nest occasionally hovered subconsciously in my photographer’s imagination.

Silence reigns during a snow storm. Generations of secrets hide in the hay loft. Iowa, 2000

The blacksmith shop on Main Street is vacant now. The rest of the village sits and waits. Iowa, 1997

Time has stopped. This could be yesterday, or it could be decades ago. *Iowa, 2003*

The stoic married to the stolid. A lifetime of hiding things inside. *Germany, 2001*

Some traditions persist, others fade away. To dream is the only way to escape. *Tokyo, 2012*

The days of sweat and toil are over. The scorching heat of summer, the freezing nights of winter, now are only vague memories. *Iowa, 1995*

This barn, now vacant, still stands waiting in vain for the next season. *Iowa, 1995*

Here lies only the past, no present, no future. The memory of pain never dies. *Iowa, 1990*

The silence of an empty classroom at the end of the day. An invisible, unknowable future. *Iowa, 1997*

Time is immobile. Today is both the future of the past and the past of the future. *Nepal, 2019*

Time in reverse. Only today exists. *Laos, 2017*

Time is inexorable, seemingly infinite. Time exists only in the present. Time may seem constant – but no one knows. *Japan, 2000*

A barn was built three generations ago. An aerie vista from the cupola. Now nothing remains. *Iowa, 1997*

Time seems frozen in winter. This field, both barren and fallow, waits for spring. *Minnesota, 2001*

Every spring the planting, every summer the growing, every fall the harvest, every winter the snowfall. *Iowa, 1997*

A generation of homesteaders was buried here. The names on their gravestones now obliterated by erosion and lichen. *Iowa, 2001*

An ineffable sadness reigns over these fields. The once vital windmill stands mute. A lone tree stands sentinel over the vacant roads. *Iowa, 2002*

A lifetime of memories disappears when a person dies. *Iowa, 1997*

Capricious memory retains some events and discards others. And remembers some things that never were. *Iowa, 1996*

At the beginning of this episode, I wrote that the photographs herein are outside my usual milieu. A mentor once counseled me: in every photography exhibit, there will be one image that doesn’t belong; the role of the curator is to see that the photograph is removed from the exhibit. Maybe I need a curator to tell me to omit this episode from The Monochrome Chronicles.

I think not. The spirit of the Rooster’s Nest is anchored somewhere deep inside – to ignore this, or to deny it, would be a mistake. During my 30 years behind the camera…well, I was unaware of the spirit for the most part, but occasionally it would materialize unexpectedly. It is part, a tiny part, of the little inner voice that guides me in photography.

The author Tom Wolfe exhorted us, “You can’t go home again.” That was correct but incomplete. “…and you can never leave home entirely, either.”

To feel that the photographs in this episode are hopelessly sentimental would be to miss the point. Remember: the Rooster’s Nest is an imaginary place.

The Monochrome Chronicles #35: The Rooster’s Nest

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