DARIN HAYTON

Tag: Windmill

  • Wind and Grass and Barbed Wire

    Wind and Grass and Barbed Wire

    I had been driving for hours when the sun finally clawed its way over the horizon. The endless black that had enveloped me since I had started out was replaced by endless sky and grasslands. And wind. Always the wind. Barbed wire fences suggested that cattle grazed on the land, somewhere. Windmills suggested that they got thirsty now and then. The ramshackle houses and barns suggested that the few people who used to live in these grasslands had moved away. I stood there in the cold wind, listened to it whistle through the barbed wire, blow through the grasses, and spin the rotor on the windmill. I enjoyed the emptiness.

    #210110

    Then the drone of a long-haul truck reached me. Carried forward on the strong wind, its engine sounded much higher pitched than the Doppler effect could have produced. Then, as it roared by, the drone stretched out into a long, low moan. I turned, climbed back through the barbed wire fence, got into my car, and continued north.

  • Windmills, or Photography as Natural History

    Windmills, or Photography as Natural History

    Singular photographs are fragments, or perhaps illustrations waiting for a story to give them context. But series of photographs seem to prompt a different kind of reflection. Collect together enough individual fragments and arrange them in some order, and the begin to reveal something you can’t see when looking at just one. The photographer engages in a sort of Aristotelian project, seeking out as many discrete examples of something in its natural setting in order to discern the features and characteristics each shares. Or the ways that each interacts with, shapes and is shaped by, that natural environment. In this way, photography becomes a project of natural history.

    #201213

    The intentional and sustained effort to take a number of related photos and to assemble them into a meaningful series encourages reflection and a sort of tranquility. And, in the end, says as much about the object studied, e.g., windmills, as it says about the photographer. But then, that’s true of any natural history endeavor.

  • Ruin is Formal

    Ruin is Formal

    Linger for a moment to think about ruin and decay. What if ruin is not the result of neglect but is, instead, an expression of value? Ruin and decay are not accidents but choices, as is our fascination with them. The one, perhaps, creates the other.

    #201207

    We live and wander amongst ruin. Ruin dots the landscape. We work around ruin, seem to preserve ruin.

    Crumbling is not an instant’s Act

    A fundamental pause

    Dilapidation’s processes

    Are organized Decays

  • More Nomadic Aesthetics

    More Nomadic Aesthetics

    There by itself, in the weak sun that fall afternoon, The Aermotor windmill turned slowly in the breeze, marking time with a rhythmic scraping of the rotating axle. It was a sort of sentinel, standing watch over a barbed wired fence and wide open range. At some point, this windmill probably served some purpose, but what I can only guess. Like so many windmills, vestiges of past hopes and dreams, this one sentenced to a lone existence, forever spinning in the wind to no effect.

    A rhythmic grating sound as the windmill rotated slowly in the hot breeze.

    Every time I see one one of these windmills I recall those lines:

    …

    Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
    Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
    The lone and level sands stretch far away.