Well, we're in Greensboro, just outside of Greensboro and we're at the silo and it's
Tijuana Harris' farm, so we're just checking out the Alabama silo.
I'd have to say it's like seven years ago now, maybe, that I first saw from the
highways of what is that crumpled thing, you know. So we came on up to it and it
was a cloudy day and I got permission and photographed it right away. I thought it
looked fantastic and, you know, completely sculptural and reminded me
it could be like a really Frank Gehry project. Well, it's an unusual project
because it's a structure that hundreds of people pass each month without looking
twice at it and it took Tim's sensibility to place in form to realize that it was
something extraordinary. So you get off the street and you come around to the
other side and the form has this amazing poetic powerful presence and once you
look at it as an object rather than just as a ruined silo, you start to see what
Tim sees in it.
It was hit by a tornado and so it's
sort of been slowly falling since then and I guess since I have my photographs
from six years ago show that it has fallen some. So three years ago I when
I was talking with the owner, Tuana, about some scrappers were gonna come out
and scrap it. At least that's what I heard. I asked her, well, don't scrap it.
What could I buy it from you? And she was like, yeah. So how much did your silo
cost you? You want another price? Well, she threw at me 2,000 and I didn't
try to bargain her down or anything. So I said, okay. So I don't know if that
was scrapped. I've paid too much. I didn't research what scrap would have been.
So I gave her 2,000 and that was that I had three years to move it off the
property and then I'm gonna rent. If I just still don't have it off, I'm gonna
pay 200 bucks a year to rent for renting the space. But I just picked up the
silo itself. As an architectural photographer, I've gotten assignments to
photograph contemporary new buildings. So I traveled to the assignment. They've
been all over the country and so you go out there for two days, three days.
Sometimes I've been on assignments for a week. Some have been fantastic. I used to
think that architects are some of the great artists. So I've been really
inspired by and fortunate to have been brought into the design world, I think.
The pole here is our camera. It's a surveillance camera that we've got it
cranked up to shooting every 12 seconds. We've had it up for a year and a half.
I've got another camera going in Gould, Arkansas, up on a grain separator.
Just keep coming. That's pretty nice though. I want to see it go out of focus
and see what goes out of focus. How much more time before you start setting the
lights? I don't know. I might have to come down and warm my fingers up because I
can hardly feel what I'm doing right now. I can send you up my gloves.
That won't help. The serial nature of it, I think, is what makes it so
interesting is what's different about this million frames. Well, think of the
casual snapshooter and think of the photographers we admire. What makes them
great? Obsession. What's the obsession? It's returning to a few ideas or a few
places and getting underneath the surfaces and mining the depths of those
places and that's exactly what Tim's done here. It's funny. I was thinking
about it today was that with all the photographs now that I have with the
surveillance camera and stuff, it sort of lives with me back in Little Rock.
I don't have to be out here. I sort of have this life with it through all the
symmetry.
