Cartage and Flowers

[Mike Lamb]

 

[hamlet]

Cold sterile industry and nature

I like the composition.

 

[Derrel]

I shoot some personal shots like this. I call the shots I do in this style my New Urban Landscape stuff. It's not for everybody. WHat I like about Mike's shot, and also Hamlet's re-interpretation is the juxtaposition of an ancient flower, Queen Anne's Lace, against railroad tracks (1840's to 1850's roughly), to the new containers sent by rail, piggyback-style more and more since the 1980's . We have ancient, early industrial revolution, and late 20th century icons, all in one image.

Queen ANne's Lace is considered by many here in the far west to be a weed; years ago, I worked running a combine for a wheat and oat farmer who called Queen Anne's Lace "wild carrot". I had NO IDEA what the heck he meant by that, but when I was assigned to combine a small,heavily-infested by Queen Anne's Lace 20-acre patch of oats down by a large creek, I knew after about one minute why he called it wild carrot: when a few hundred plants of this species have been sucked into a combine and threshed, there in a totally overpowering smell of carrots that fills the nose, even through a modern hepa-grade air conditioning system! The plant's normal smell is utterly different once the plants have been cut and run through a combine's separator mechanism and the straw spilled out the back of the machine.