Having been a photojournalist for most of my life, I usually make pictures to tell a story to others. But over the last couple of years, I’ve realized that some pictures aren’t necessarily meant to tell a story at all—I make them as a spiritual or emotional response to the world around me. The pictures might tell a story to another person, or they may never make it out of my camera. I make them because, before my eyes, something in me recognized and responded to God’s presence.
Sometimes it happens that these random visions and moments begin to group themselves together, and show that, as a collective, they are “about” something. That’s what happened with “weird stuff in the woods.” First there was one picture; then another a couple weeks later; then six in one day; and then I realized that here was a group of pictures that belonged together, and it was up to me to understand what concept or idea bound them to each other.
Gulf club, tributary of Clear Creek, Highland County.
It came to me that although the images were of junk, cast out in the woods where I’d found them—out of context, away from the places they were intended to be useful—this was not the “usual” junk.
Doll’s head.
I grew up in the country. I’m familiar with the way farm families make their own garbage dumps—with broken implements, used fence wire, old lard buckets, rusted appliances, and the occasional motor car all pushed together at the bottom of a ravine or at the edge of the woods somewhere. But this was not that. These items weren’t gathered together. I found them randomly; nothing else close by; no explanation for how they’d come to be there. And they shared another commonality: although they weren’t meant to be there, they looked natural in their setting. They had grown into the landscape—or the landscape had grown into them in such a way that they looked as though they belonged where they were.
They didn’t belong there. But somehow life had persevered around the non-living, had incorporated these bits of artificial fabrication into a natural design.
The more I looked at them—the more weird pieces I discovered—the more I began to think of them as little, everyday resurrections.
Broken drainage tile in a tributary of Clear Creek, Highland County.
They were not life: animating what was not living. But, from a phrase I learned from the theologian Marjorie Suchocki, they were minute instances of God working with the world as it is to bring it to what it can be.
They reminded me of the verse from Genesis 50, when Joseph tells his brothers that he cannot be angry with them for the harm they once did him, because God has transformed that harm, and transformed Joseph, as well: “The evil you planned to do me has by God’s design been turned to good, to bring about the present result: the survival of a numerous people.” The evil has, by God’s design, been turned to good.
These are just pieces of junk, mostly, and not the intention of evil. Thoughtlessly, unintentionally, they could have brought harm to these woods, and maybe they did—killed off a seedling here, girdled a tree there, blocked a rivulet that fed a pool where minnows gathered. But life overran them anyway. God works with the world the way it is to bring it to what it can be.
Bottle brush.
—Daniel J. Kasztelan
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