The Feather | April 7, 2012
Medium: Photography, Nikon D3S
Date: April 7, 2012
Project/Body of Work: Souvenir Project
A single dark feather, photographed against a warm neutral ground. The quill tapers to a fine point at the bottom; the barbs are slightly disheveled, the vane asymmetrical — clearly found, not arranged. Light falls across it with the quiet attention of a still life.
This image was made the same day the feather was found.
Story:
In the spring of 2012, I was in the middle of an extensive application process for a Communications and Media Coordinator position with AFWA’s Management Assistance at NCTC in Shepherdstown — an organization that provides leadership training for state fish and wildlife agencies across the country. The application included a self-promotional ad as a design assignment, and I had wracked my brain for days without landing anywhere useful.
On the morning of the deadline, I gave up, told my roommate I didn't have it in me, drove twenty minutes to Beans in the Belfry, sat outside with a chai latte, and surrendered to the possibility of simply failing at the task.
While we were sitting there, I suddenly discovered this feather at my feet.
I picked it up and stared at it, and something clicked. The feather was a quill. A quill was a writing instrument. A writing instrument was a tool of communication, and not just any tool, but the one that had carried human expression across centuries. The concept arrived whole: don't just hire someone who knows the tools. Hire someone who knows how to make them speak.
I drove to the nearest art supply store, bought some materials, went home, set up a light box, and made this photograph. Then I wrote copy. Then in the last hours the idea expanded. Two additional images were captured — a daguerreotype, an egg — each one another tool of representation, each one another way of driving home the point: Don’t just hire someone with skills. Hire a story-teller. The ad became a three-part series, completed in the final hours before the deadline.
Was it any good as a self-promotional ad? Who knows.
One way or another, I got the job, and that began an entirely new phase of my professional and creative life.
Process Notes:
This image lives in Souvenir as both a daily record of that experience and something far weightier and infinitely more complex. The project had always been about locating significance — choosing to represent a moment, fully aware that representation can only fail the original event, and that this failure doesn't invalidate the act. This photograph is one of the clearest examples I have of what that actually looks like in practice. The moment of choosing to see something as meaningful, and what that choice then made possible.
It has became a threshold image and an active recurring symbol. The ripples from that day (and this image) are still moving outward across my work, this site, and my life. Sometimes we all speak in hyperbole, and I am certainly no exception to that tendency. This assertion however is not being dramatized. I could fill up many volumes with the encounters I’ve had and continue to have with that feather and its echoes.
The feather itself is sitting in my home on the altar currently.
