Sad Shack

While living down in Kentucky a few years back, I spent alot of time on weekends out roaming around sometimes quite far afield, just poking about here and there on back roads, in the back woods, and believe you me, Kentucky has some serious back woods. More than once I had a shotgun or a rifle pointed in my general direction, folks down there don't always care for strangers with cameras. This may be one of the most forlorn photographs I ever made. I make no claim to being a good or great photographer, am average at best, but every once in a while a mood that I'm trying to catch almost comes through in the finished image. This place, the one-room shack, the ancient automobile rusting away, the empty mailbox; whole novels could be written around this image, thousands of words anyway, words like heartbreak, loss, abandon, desolation, and you can complete the list... Who lived here and drove this car to the nearby coal mines? Is his skeleton still lying on the disintegrating bed in the shack, with sheaves of moldy paper stacked in a corner, paper on which he had carefully typed out a lifetime's worth of poems?