Voices:Slideshow

Voices

Online Magazine of the Missouri Historical Society

Summer 2007

While working on this photo essay, I was interested in a visual equivalent to air conditioning. When it becomes hot in St. Louis, as in July or August, the thermostats are turned down, windows are closed, and a neutralizing hum ensues. We feel comfortably tuned out, but unfortunately isolated from the rhythmic sounds of cicadas, the cool colors of sky and grass, and the movements of sparrows in the trees and rabbits in the yard.

I want these images to act as an antidote to the spectacles of contemporary life—all the artificial colors of neon and painted orange; televisions turned on in every waiting room I visit; digital communications relentlessly finding me; cars, too many cars, and any other bombardment of stimuli from which cicadas, the sky, or sparrows would flee. My “visual air conditioning” is meant to be dreamy, an external respite turned inward at just the correct moment for quiet reflections and for losing oneself in slow, cool, lush beauty.

I shot these photographs on film using a Crown Graphics 4 X 5 camera.

Air Conditioning Photographs and text by Cary Horton

Cary Horton is Staff Photographer at the Missouri Historical Society.