big sky state (2023) (Patreon)

This shot is from on my way to Bannock, where I took yesterday's photo. This was also part of my attempt to keep the square-crop theme going. It's a fairly typical eastern Montana landscape, but the combination of the fence and poles offsetting each other's weight in the photo made it such a perfect choice for a symmetrical-yet-not-symmetrical framing like this. 

As I stopped to take this photo, a man in a large Ram 2500 stopped to make sure I was okay and my car hadn't broken down, which was really sweet until I saw the dawning realization on his face that he was talking to a transsexual, at which point he got curt and left, and I watched the rear view mirror nervously for the next six miles. I was so rural I hadn't even had cell signal in half an hour; it is a place that I suspect not many tgirls tread. I know I've written pretty extensively and poetically about how travelling through these places scares me, but it's worth reiterating that it's terrifying. 

As I look through the work of Pictures Generation-era photographers and see all their portraits and how deeply human so much of their work is, I realize why my photos are always so devoid of people. I'm not some hardline group f/64 gal militantly committed to shooting landscapes; it's just that I'm scared of every unknown encounter in the place that I live. I really want to try so much more than just big sky landscapes, but I think I'm just going to have to wait for now.