Provincial Highway 22, near Gerald, Saskatchewan
June 2009
Form meets function meets form. Nature and agricultural architecture meet on this slope in rural Saskatchewan. I enjoy photographing in Canada. When walking onto property owned by total strangers up North, I have yet to meet paranoid landowners, asking the ubiquitous annoying question, "What are you doing?"
Which is very nice, because while I usually have some sarcastic comeback while in the United States ("You see this thing here I'm holding? It's called a camera. See, what you do is you point it at the subject you want to photograph. A hole in the camera opens, and an image of the subject is captured on film." Part of my shtick is pronouncing the key words very slowly, as though I were speaking to (in the words of Rahm Emanuel) "f***ing retards." How I've lucked out by not being brutalized by local and state cops (particularly in Texas) is a testament to either the Due Process clause of the U.S. Constitution, or just plain dumb luck (I suspect the latter).
However, in foreign countries, I am always on my best behavior. I've only had one incident remotely approaching a run-in with police in Canada (Mexico is another story), and good manners have always pulled me out of a potentially awkward situation.
On the breezy June day I took this photograph, a gracious Russian immigrant farmer greeted me graciously, and she and her husband gave me a tour of the family farm -- from the back seat of their four wheeler!
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was too reminiscent of an image that did get included, of an even more brilliant crimson farm storage tank -- coincidentally, just up the road, near Esterhazy.