It’s amazing how tirelessly you can work when you are truly drawn into something. Since posting them in color, I have been converting all 98 photos from the Kidron series into black and white.
And, as the pros out there can attest to, there is no cookie-cutter approach to digital black and white – even when you’re using such an awesome tool like Silver Efex Pro (I can’t believe I used to do this the long way…).
Anyway.
I like them better in black and white. What’s your take?
Sofie Dittmann Check this out!, Photographs, Photography General fine art, kidron livestock auction, Ohio, photography
Thank God for the gift of time. One of the projects I was working on last year was one with a subject that I have been living closeby of for years. But just like everything else – if it’s readily available, it’s the last thing on your mind. Or something you don’t think of for a photo project.
I have been at the Kidron Livestock Auction a number of times with visitors, and we did what everybody does when they get there. We took the usual touristy pictures. My daughter calls those “touron shots”.
Yet, as my mind was wandering one day this past summer, it occurred to me that one reason those kinds of photos are not only boring, but hopelessly stereotypical is that they always a) focus on the Amish, as if this were some kind of a zoo, and b) thereby either mostly romanticize or sometimes actually villify their subject.
Most people don’t see this place for what it is: a microcosm of the local economy, full of hard-working and down-to-earth people. There are of course the Amish, their “English” counterparts, who come there to auction off and buy livestock. There are the peddlers and vendors, the hotdog cart and the Asians selling cheap plastic items of all kinds. There are the busloads of tourons. And there was me. And so here is my version of Ohio rural street photography, all taken over the last five months within the same block around the Kidron Auction.
I was interested mostly in interactions between different people, but also in their individual state of being.
Sofie Dittmann Check this out!, Photographs, Photography General fine art, kidron livestock auction, Ohio, photography
