Location: The Morristown Post Office.
Today, the workers will return, the wheelbarrow will come out of the ground, and so on. It’s a very obvious example of what I’m talking about. But let’s say today was a Saturday or Sunday, and everything was left just so all weekend. Though the objects would be in the same position, the photograph might be gone.
By which I mean, really, the light might be different, and the weather. The heavy clouds in the sky might be gone. When light and weather change, photographs can come into being or disappear.
My favorite example of still life never sleeping is a basketball backboard that for many years hung over my neighbor’s garage. It not only had no net, it had no hoop, just some rectangular marks where the hoop had once been.
The backboard was made of plywood and had an unusual shape, like a muffin in cross-section. It was painted green, but over the years the paint had chipped and cracked and faded and the layers of plywood had warped.
There was no doubt in my mind that one could search the world and not find another backboard quite like it. I enjoyed looking at it over the fence every morning when I got into my car. I often thought about photographing it, but there was no urgency to do so. It was just always there.
One morning, though, the light was particularly nice, and I had a few extra minutes, so I got my camera and photographed what I thought of as the Oracle of the Green Muffin.
The next morning, when I came out to my car a crew of housepainters were spreading tarps and removing the backboard from the front of the garage. By evening, when I returned, the backboard was gone and the garage had a new coat of paint.
I laughed at my luck. Eternity had come to an end, and on the very last day I had taken the picture I had gazed at idly for years.
It was on that day I decided that, despite any appearances to the contrary, still life, in fact, never sleeps. Now, whenever I see something that is at that moment alive as a photograph, I try to respond to it with same urgency camera-toting bird watchers do when they see a rare species alight on the branch of a tree.