Today we continue our publication of photography with the work of Melanie Faith, who captured these images as summer was ending and fall beginning.
About the images, Melanie writes:
I enjoyed creating the image with its warm, late-summer hues of the orange and green and tan; the way the evening light spills across the ground feels like a story to me in itself. As a photographer and writer, I love the challenge of creating story from the ordinary that people might otherwise rush past.
In an art-history class in college, I studied triptychs and was fascinated by the three-panel artworks during trips to the Smithsonian and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As a poet, I often gravitate to threes, especially three lines per stanza. I like the slightly uneven waltz-step of having three thoughts complement each other and also bring new and contrasting ideas to a piece.
In my photo of the peach orchard, the central view creates a centerpiece for looking at the fruit that was ripe and dropped before it could be harvested, while the panels/side-imagery on the left and right shift the focus and draw the eye to different symbolic ideas.
In the left panel, the spilt fruit is the main draw, while in the right panel, the orchard ladder and its worn rungs and grainy wood call for the viewer’s attention. What does it mean to work or rest (no one is on that ladder, after all), to be too late, or to create purpose from something that is left behind or past its time but still useful and beautiful? Ladders are wonderfully transporting as conveyances to help get a job done while also serving as personal symbols in dreams and much of painting and art. Fruit is also both everyday and extraordinary, collective and personal.
