There is a particular skill in noticing things on a drive and then actually stopping to do something about them. I have this skill approximately twice a year, if conditions are right and there is a camera on the passenger seat.
My daughter needed dropping off. Her friend too. They were going to watch someone play something somewhere in the north of the Vendée: I did not ask many questions, which is apparently the correct posture at this stage of parenting. I dropped them off, pointed the car back towards home, and drove past the same fields I had been quietly registering for weeks.
I had first noticed them whilst out with my son: flat, wide, open, the kind of agricultural landscape you pass through on the way to somewhere else. The north of the Vendée is not the Vendée most people expect. There are no bocage hedgerows here, no hills doing anything dramatic. It is cereal crops and telegraph poles and sky, and in the right light it holds very still, as if it knows something you don’t.
Each time I had driven through it I had thought: I should stop here. Each time, I had not stopped.
This time the X-T2 was on the passenger seat with the Helios 44-2 on the front of it. The Helios is a Soviet-era 58mm lens with a reputation for doing interesting things with light that is not pointed directly at it: a slight warmth, a softness at the edges, a quality that sits somewhere between documentation and memory. It is not the lens you reach for when precision is the priority. It is the lens you reach for when you are not entirely sure what you want but you suspect something is there.
I pulled over. I was in the field for under half an hour.
The wheat was at that transitional point between green and gold: not yet fully dried through, some stalks still holding their earlier colour while others had already given up on it. The light was coming in low and flat from the west, doing what late evening light in June does when it decides to cooperate; which is to say, it was doing most of the work for me.
What I kept returning to were the telegraph poles. There is one in particular that appears in several of the frames: a single upright in an otherwise uninterrupted field, placed there at some point for entirely practical reasons by someone who was not thinking about photographs. You notice the geometry of it. The wires pulling away at angles. The fact that the land is so flat and the sky is so blank that the pole reads almost as a deliberate placement; a decision rather than an accident.
I spent some time at the field edges, where the cultivated gives way to the accidental. The daisies there were doing well. They grow in at the margins of the wheat, small and white and backlit, and they are the kind of foreground detail that would look arranged if you had arranged it. I shot some of them flat to the ground, the X-T2’s tilting screen earning its keep in a way that my knees were grateful for.
There is a young corn seedling in one of the frames: a single green plant in dry, pale earth, with a long row of its identical companions stretching away behind it into blur. I cannot give you a strong editorial reason for having taken that photograph. I took it anyway. Sometimes the thing that catches the eye simply catches the eye, and you either commit to it or you don’t.
The last frames were the closest: individual wheat ears, the small bristles of grain, the way the Helios renders the background when you are that close. There is a version of that shot that is technically not what I would call an achievement. There is another version where the light is doing something I did not entirely plan and the grain looks less like grain and more like the idea of it.
I prefer the second version, which is convenient because that is the one I came home with.
I was back before dark. My daughter was collected later, still pleasantly vague about the exact nature of what she had watched.
Half an hour in a field in the north of the Vendée. I should probably stop more often.
