Mennonite Heritage Village 12 June 2016Steinback, Manitobasomewhat unexpectedly the highlight o

Mennonite Heritage Village 
12 June 2016
Steinback, Manitoba

somewhat unexpectedly the highlight of manitoba (excepting a few spots in winnipeg) snuck up on me in the form of the Mennonite Heritage Village. the place had a polarizing effect as my travel pal tyler hated the place and all it’s preserved artifice–so much as to decimate his spirits for a while. for me it was a revitalizing playground of shapes and textures and light and color. so many ways to arrange frames and explore. I could literally spend a month there I think. The fact that it happened to also have real live mennos walking the grounds (ahem-being stalked by me) was just a bonus. In hindsight it’s expressed purpose of being a heritage village could have been stripped away and replaced with almost any purpose and I’d have found it equally rewarding. 

I realized only after the trip that this experience helped me unlock a certain confusion I’d had over my interest in the abandoned and the old buildings dotting the rural landscapes I love so much. I think it’s a rejection of our improved abilities to make smooth near-perfect surfaces. to unify and homogenize color. gone are the hand cut white picket fences that are like manna from heaven in bright afternoon light (the contrast by god!) and in their place we have perfectly uniform, brown, grey brown, red brown, brown brown fences everywhere. 

then you go into the city and it’s just steel and glass and concrete as far as the eye can see. looking back I see explanations for the many pictures I have of the rough surfaces of the pavement taken while shooting street photography. our endless pursuit of smoothing the rough edges of everything leaves us bereft of complex surfaces to smooth ourselves against. Be it with our eye, or by being worn over time through physical interactions. we’re losing so much. 

when i’m lucky enough to be out in the world shooting, and lucky enough my body is working right so that I can tighten my focus I’m always looking for complexity. for depth, for color and texture. for layers. for some sort local chaos speaking to a more global harmony. 

I end up in alleyways. i end up in fields of wheat. I end up in moose jaw tracing complex patterns of power lines. i end up too close to the shiny surfaces hoping against hope the distortions and reflections might add up to something beautiful. 

I tried then to explain to tyler why our stop there was exactly what i needed to get back on track after a few gruelling days of travel and couldn’t. it turns out it took several months for these realizations to bubble to the surface.