The man hovers, he thinks, just of frame, the hand on knee ready to grab and stay. But the dog has spotted something offstage and if he’s still it’s just for that muscle-tightening split-second before the leap. I love how this tattered cardboard frame barely contains the action of this little scene, a not-quite-perfectly-captured moment.
Mistakes — mistakes are my favorite. Fingers in the frame, the photographer’s shadow blotting out the subject, the subject’s head cut off … This one gallops right past incompetent and back around toward sort of weirdly artistic, or at least intentional. Funny, even sweet, because someone kept it anyway.
I joke about having antiques-store ESP. There’s no possible way to look at every single thing without going into a blood-sugar episode or getting a migraine, so I’ll say, “I’m going to find a birthday gift for Robin.” And then I will. A few weeks ago, I was eating supper in my kitchen, and I said, “I wish I had a yellow metal rolling cart like Grandma Hayes used to have.” I promptly forgot about it, then walked right up to one the next day. Christmas shopping with my friend Shannon recently at a great old warehouse of a place in Edinburgh (Indiana, of course), I said, “This is where I found my orange Carnival juice glasses a few years ago. I could use some more of those.” And there they were, one aisle over. Shannon marveled.
It’s a random talent, only marginally useful, but I’ll take what I can get. Dog photos, like books fallen open in the middle, give me the same weird feeling a lot of times, a vague intuition. This one in particular gives off a feeling of unease, with its weird pitching angle, its dog cowering on a strange perch, its dark slash of a man silhouetted at right. What is he doing there, that forbidding shadow blotting out the lines of the house?
