Nancy, Danville, Virginia c. 1965

Emmet Gowin took this photo, Nancy, Danville, Virginia, sometime in the last century, and it really gets under my skin. The composition is so strange! There's a man holding a tree, a little girl perched on one branch, and two babies just sitting in the tree like ornaments. Not to mention the dog who looks like it's about to jump. What on earth was Gowin thinking? Was it posed or a fleeting moment of childhood captured? Maybe he saw something surreal in the everyday, something magical in the mundane. The photo itself is almost like a sketch: soft and full of light. I find myself drawn to these kinds of images, where you feel like you are looking into another world. You start to wonder what else you might find up in the branches. I get the feeling that Gowin was saying something about the weirdness of childhood, and how we are all just hanging on for dear life.