That’s what turns up when you go to a place where all the images are abstract, AND you have an eye for such oddities. You find them.
It was the day before (Western) Good Friday, the first date of our Easter… and once again I found myself back at that place which draws me as if I’m the magnet. All that iron, specifically a whole steelyard’s worth, the largest one in the country and open to whatever weather the sky chooses to bestow upon it.
With at least a few months between my visits, there’s been time for two crucial things to happen, either one or both. Customers come, buy some sheets or pipes or I-beams, and expose the next layer(s) to the elements. Or, barring that, there’s been rain, and that has altered the topmost layers of everything with a little more rust. Or, like I said, both of these things.
This time was the first of my five visits when they had to use a forklift to take the top sheet of a whole stack of 2mm thick ones, about 5 or 6m long by 2 or so wide. At that size, it’s floppy, not stiff. So when the forks of the lift get under it and start lifting it, it bends, and then gets dragged off the sheet under it, with a bit of scratching happening as they rub against each other. I saw, and filmed, the whole thing because I hadn’t seen it before.
Then I waited for just a few minutes in the warm sun for the newly revealed sheet’s leftover rainwater to dry off it, as the last rain had been only a couple of days before. There it was, a brand new surface to marvel at and explore with my camera.
This is where the image of an empty cave or tomb came from, just in time (for me) for Good Friday and its following Easter Sunday. As for “Brontosaurus Waiting for the Meteor Apocalypse”, as I called my next find… that was on one side of a square tube with width about 10 or 12cm, and showing more rust, because it had been out in weather for longer than the huge sheets. So, typically these pieces have smaller scenes with less blue (usually) and more warm rust tones, although here I found a good mix.
There was nothing else to call this piece than what I went with: That’s exactly what it is, and it can’t really be anything else, I think.
“Alien Family Stroll” could certainly be called other things by other people, however. But this is what I see in it; it’s also from that freshly discovered steel sheet. I marvel, shoot, and move on to the next intrigue.
They’re fairly used to me showing up by now. This time, though, I had finally gotten around to having two pieces of my work framed for them. One of the posters from last fall’s Rust exhibition in the city, which featured 16 of my photos… and one of those photos itself, called “Angel”. The guy who runs the place accepted them with thanks and put them straight on the wall. The door remains open for me, and I’m pulled back time and again. The magic never fails, new every time, has never so far got old. May it never.
Blog by Tony Hanmer
Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer and photographer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 2000 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/
He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri: www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti
