The New York Times Magazine on Peter Mitchell: “The Startling Beauty of Scarecrows”
We’re so pleased for photographer Peter Mitchell, whose photographs of scarecrows Geoff Dyer calls, “signposts from the past,” in his thoughtful essay in The New York Times Magazine.
Dyer begins, “A photograph is not the same as the thing photographed. But sometimes photographs make you conscious of that thing in a way the thing itself never quite did. More precisely, they make you aware of things—stuff—about that thing of which you were barely conscious or entirely oblivious. Whether photographing a pepper or a toilet bowl, the great early-20th-century photographer Edward Weston repeated insistently that the camera was uniquely equipped 'for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself.' Back then the potential of the camera was still being established, was inevitably drawing attention to itself. In the case of Peter Mitchell’s pictures of scarecrows, it is as if the photographs do not exist, as if we just chanced upon these creatures in the course of walks we’ve taken hundreds of times before. So how did we miss them?”
You can read the full article in The New York Times Magazine here.
