This gritty old weathered farm truck is a subject dear to photographers looking for great black and white photography subjects to highlight the tonal range and drama of black and white photography.
I tend to forget that this type of subject matter is not readily available to most people. Sometimes I look at the street photography of photographers in New York City or Boston and think, gee I wish I had access to the city streets to take photographs of cool buildings and interesting characters found down dark alleys or in Time Square.
But the reality is that there are thousands of photographers working those urban areas – local photographers and tourists alike. Meanwhile its rare that I run into another photographer when I’m out and about on the back roads of New Hampshire and Vermont taking photographs of a way of life that fewer and few people can relate to – farming, working the land, fixing your own car, working the forest, working with animals, creating local specialty products like maple syrup.
We don’t have any skyscrapers or Naked Cowboys in rural New Hampshire and Vermont but we have a lot of old stuff. Old houses, old barns, old junker cars, old tractors and old ways of doing things, like actually driving to the store rather than having a drone deliver milk to our front door.
I found this old International Harvester farm truck on the side of the road at a maple sugar house in Stowe, Vermont. This kind of relic from the past is saved in places where they don’t have a lot of money to waste and you never know when something can be re-purposed or fixed up. This beautiful old truck with its chrome grill slightly out of sorts and its peeling, weathered paint makes for a fascinating black and white photographic study.
A ten minute drive on the other side of Stowe, Vermont, I was face to face with a totally different type of farm essential. A beautiful dairy cow calmly chewing her cud in the rain.
Crossing the Connecticut River into New Hampshire I ran into one of the local product producers working the steaming sap and creating the sugary sweet state treasure – maple syrup.
Further south in New Hampshire I came across this fine old tractor still working the hay fields in Etna, NH – as soon as that back tire gets fixes.
A yup, we don’t have skyscrapers in rural Vermont and New Hampshire but we do have interesting people and things going on if you look hard enough.