My father was not an educated man. Nor was he a sensitive or politically correct man. One of his favorite "aphorisms,"(inevitably followed by a hearty guffaw in finding a class beneath even the lowly Pollacks or Bohemians and certainly German factory workers like himself) picked on farmers, who as everyone knows, aren't a whole lot smarter than the box of the rocks they pile along their fence-rows.
"The dumber the farmer , the bigger the potato! Ha ha ha ha ha!"
I think a lot about his words, partly because it makes me laugh to remember his belly laugh, but also because of the profundity of his words, well beyond his conscious understanding. When I was in college studying engineering, his dream for me, he had no idea that I would spend most of my working life trying to eke a living farming a small piece of worn out rolling hills in Western Wisconsin. I'm sure I was a disappointment to him in many ways, but I am grateful to him for these simple words of wisdom that have guided and continue to guide my search for truth and meaning in my life.
The irony this double comparative expresses, and the fact that it can be so true, makes it worthy of serious study and more familiarity, This feels like as good a reason as any to blog about. A blog will also give me an opportunity to publish some of my photographic work that I have always felt needed a broader audience than it can get in my local rural setting, as well as a chance to wax political on a current hot button issues, and I am only going to do one blog!
Not all of my photographic work elucidates the profundity of my dad's words, but it will lend credence to it, for, most certainly, there is a corollary that applies to photographers, or at least photographer-farmers. With any luck I will post a couple of images a week, one from a recent shooting and one from the archives of my fine art images.
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