TECHNICAL DETAILS
Andy Cardinal with Sunflower, Centerville, Minnesota, 2015
Leica D-Lux (Typ109)
21mm ISO 200 1/500 f/8
ANDY’S GOLD
All summer long I’ve been shooting a patch of sunflowers growing along the road next to a neighboring farmer’s field. They were planted in a small strip, just a few rows wide. A shield, as it were, between the passing cars pouring down their commutes to the City and the working earth so few of their drivers probably notice. I’ve always loved sunflowers. When this patch started up and first bloomed in the late spring, I was drawn to shoot them. And throughout the summer, I would periodically walk the eight-tenths of a mile from my very suburban subdivision out to Centerville Road, down along the dusty shoulder, across the road to the west, and into the rows of flowers.
Surrounded by green and yellow, I shot literal pictures and abstracts. Sometimes, I just stood there in the breeze as the flowers swayed around me, enraptured. I know what Van Gogh must have felt. Today, as I was sitting at my computer of a Sunday, a cool, partly-cloudy fall afternoon, I was gripped by a feeling. I needed to shoot the sunflowers, now brown, their heads bent over droopily. I needed to shoot them before they were cut down. It was a premonition.
Grabbing a camera and a jacket, I set out, thinking along the route about how this small patch of growth had captured me throughout this season, and how every day I looked forward to seeing them, for they greeted me coming and going on my drive to work. Stepping into the crunchy, dying leaves, I took stock of how–just across the last few weeks since I had been here–the scene had changed. Bent heads, brown, facing downward. They held no more turgor pressure to make them proud and swivel their faces daily across the arc of the heavens. The small ones, some still with clinging and tattered leaves spilling glimpses of orange and yellow about their cones, were largely stripped and barren. Sparrows, chickadees, jays, finches. All have had their fill. Some of the larger ones still bore full bellies of seeds, covered in the small, yellow flowers swirled in a Fibonacci series of impossible, intersecting lines. My bolt-out-of-the-blue need to shoot the flowers today was for a reason, as it turned out. Only several minutes after I started making exposures, I heard a rumble and across the driveway came Andy Cardinal on his small, green John Deere tractor. Andy’s family has lived on this land since his great-grandparents first settled there in the 1800s. He has lived at the corner of Centerville and Birch for nearly all of his 89 years. There were those few in Germany in the 1940s that he, typically, seems reluctant to talk about, aside from to say that he was Army — infantry. But those aside, he has farmed here for most of his days.
“Look at these little ones!” he exclaims. “The birds have cleaned them out.” But that’s OK with Andy. He says the little ones aren’t really there to produce anything. They’re mostly for the birds anyway. He talks of them individually as he walks the first few feet of a row. “Empty. Nothing here. Been eaten.” But there is no remorse, just a gleam in his eye. “The big ones, now I bet they still have most of their seeds, especially down here where it’s been wetter.” He’s right. He grabs a huge sunflower head, nearly 15 inches across, and swings it around for me to see. He starts brushing the little yellow flowers off the tips of the seeds, revealing the pale, even rows underneath. “Here we go. Look, they just took a little from the edge. Yeah, these big ones are OK.” The conversation moves well beyond sunflowers. Local politicians, local land development, the recent town parade for which he was the Grand Marshall, his son who now runs the certified organic farming operations. “How can I show you all the pictures I’ve shot this summer, Andy?” I asked. This was not the first time we had chatted this year as I clicked away amid the golden strips along the edge of the Cardinal farm. “I don’t suppose you have internet access?” Andy directed me to retrieve a card from the produce building in their driveway. A neat little red farm stand, neon “Open” sign shining thorough the window. I spoke with his grandson inside and got some contact information. Eventually, I needed to begin my walk back up Centerville Road. Andy grabbed a large pruning shear from the platform at the back of his tractor that held two large blue tubs, presumably for sunflower heads. He set to work on the stalks, some towering 10 or 12 feet high. I turned around after I was a hundred yards or so up the road, and he was working the line, his blue overalls and work shirt matching the sky as the great yellow and brown stalks tipped over one by one in the warm afternoon sun.
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