Photography is ostensibly a means to discover the world around us. But the world around us, if we look closely, is a reflection of ourselves. Often, it is the unexpected discovery that leads us to a deeper understanding of who we are in the moment. Take for example this duck. I found it at Limantour Beach one morning sitting atop a dumpster. There was no one around, but there was a crow in a tree nearby watching me as I approached. The duck was about the size of a child, slumped over and staring directly at me, as if waiting for my arrival. Upon closer inspection I found it to be saturated with water. It was likely found on the beach, washed up by the waves after having been tossed in the ocean. What I would have given to have been the one to find it there on the beach. But that was not my destiny. The duck was waiting for me where it was meant for me to see and it seemed that the crow was waiting too. He watched me take my photographs, curiously rubbing his beak back and forth across the branch he was sitting on in that strange way that crows do.
So, here was one bird, real and living, watching my reaction to another, stuffed and perched on a trash receptacle where it was bound for some landfill. What was it thinking, this crow? Did it recognize the form of this effigy? Could it recognize that it was a likeness of something living? I believe that it could, and did.
But at the time I was focused on the duck. How did it get here? What journey did it take? From some factory in a land far across oceans, fabricated by cheap labor, a wiry Chinese lad with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, and shipped back across the seas in a dark container aboard one of those behemoth ships of the Han-Sing line, bound for a carnival side show perhaps where it hung for months above some rigged game of chance, waiting amid the smoke and calliope, coveted by thousands of little girls before it was won one sultry evening by a rangy young man half-drunk on watered down PBR's yet still deadly with a fastball. How he carried it in triumph all that night, or maybe gave it to his girl, where hung beneath her skinny arm suffering her giggles and spilled beer, and then maybe sat atop her nightstand staring back at her through the dark of a thousand nights in some Velveteen dream that was never quite fulfilled. Of course he was named. Of course he was forgotten and abandoned and then tossed away, flung back into the ocean from which he came, the castaway duck riding the currents face down, buoyant but not as a duck should be, because of course he's not really a duck but only a facsimile fashioned out of polyester to appear duck-like to simpletons who are so easily deceived.
So, although I took hundreds of photographs that day - photographs of trees and sand dunes and objects that were not representations, but true - this, this first photograph of the day was the most meaningful, the most lasting, the most surreal. I could have turned around and went home without taking another and called the day good. The duck and I, we had ourselves a little conversation. Me with my feeble words and my surrogate eye, and he with that knowing look in his eyes, a look that says, who's the fool now? He was on his way to the dump to rot, forgotten. By my turn would come soon enough. And what story would stand for me after I was gone?
o O o
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