Over the course of a dozen years, photographer Georgia Sheron took numerous photographs of her next-door neighbor, Uncle John Ludorf, a farmer who plowed with horses and milked cows by hand into his late nineties. Her striking prints, accompanied by John s observations as garnered in a number of interviews, offer an artful, nuanced, and unsentimental look at a bygone way of life.
I love the way certain photographs overwhelm with the sheer immediacy and vastness of the terrain, so that it takes a few moments to realize there s a tiny person there. In other photographs, we re persuaded to perceive the way the photographer does: John s spread fingers are not so very different from the splayed branches of the towering tree; his veins are only the living version of the shape he holds." From the introduction by Ann Beattie"