An Autumn of Memories
For nine years I worked at a small, family owned and operated nursery and garden shop. The name was Platt’s, after the owner Dean Platt and his wife, Lee. My father was the manager, which explains how I secured a job there in 1995 (I was 14 at the time, the youngest allowed by law). It was, without a doubt, 9 years of my life filled with characters and stories that live as though they were legend. My first shift in the garden shop was during an evening around Thanksgiving. My role at the time was mostly to handle selling Christmas trees, one of the major items the garden shop handled in the off season. My first night was spent “washing the floors,” something I’d do innumerable times during my employment there. Since I was only 14, I couldn’t handle much of the money stuff nor the locking up duties. Most of those nights I spent with a man named Jim, a slightly past middle aged man who himself worked part time to help supplement his income. That was the norm for those employed by Platt’s: an entire cast filled with part-time players and those often in search of “something else” who bid their time while waiting for the real show.
That’s the true significance of the years I spent working there. The nursery itself was simply a stage for many scenes to be played out with many people moving in and out of various roles. These endless montages of scenes not only played out across the landscapes of personal lives, but reflected the world around them. The problems of the community, of culture, of our world found their ways into the tiny corner of the universe that Platt’s occupied. It would be wrong to think that the stories of just a few could be seen here. The story of humanity itself was etched into the buildings, the land, and even the air.
The hardest part of photography and as a photographer, for me, is to somehow treat the meaning this place has for me with respect–respect for not only how the images can be seen but how those images can honor its importance. That is, it isn’t enough to just take a few snap shots here and there and call it a memory. The memories already exist vividly. How can a photograph match the meaning I have from all these experiences? How can a photograph not only live up to the memories I have but to also be attentive to and listen for the larger stories being whispered here? When I went back to photograph the nursery after Dean Platt passed away, I found myself going backwards in time. The images weren’t waiting to be created by my camera, they were already there. It was a matter of matching what I could do with my equipment to live up to the emotive experience carried in my body.
What would I take pictures of? What would “tell the story” of Platt’s Nursery through images? Could images be enough? Would these pictures mean anything to those who had never worked there, never been there, never even heard of it? How could images tell about the constant dust and dirt that enveloped the property? How would a picture explain those long summer evenings spent waiting for storm clouds to come closer? What could any of this say about the fall colors and sitting on the counter top feeling the cool autumn breeze from outside mix with the warm stale air inside the building? And what of that side door that led out to a small patch of grass under a majestic Magnolia tree? What about those long autumn nights spent raking leaves while wisps of firewood smoke would bend down and fill my lungs? Or those agonizing springs spent waiting for the brilliant greens of turf to re-appear after a long winter? I realized as I was turning into the parking lot that I was woefully unprepared for this task. I had not been back to visit in some time. Even then, my visits were short visits–in and out affairs. It was a part of my life content to stay behind I thought. The stakes were too high. I nearly considered turning around and going home.
I like to think of my best photographs as “quiet monuments to the every day unseen.” A shovel leaning against a concrete container wall. An ancient scale used to weigh boulders and majestic sheets of limestone. A simple open door to a simple gray-blue building. As I walked around the property that afternoon, these were the things that I was constantly drawn to. The things anyone might take for granted. This was a shovel I may well have used myself years ago. I like the solitariness of the handle, the damage to the blade from years of scratching between pieces of river rock and gravel. The sweat from the hundreds of people who have used this shovel penetrates the wood grain and smooths over the roughness. This is a world that works. Would it have been dishonest to try for flashy shots? I don’t know, but it certainly felt like it that afternoon. The “vivid” setting on my camera would have been a traitor. Even those days of brilliant blue skies and painfully white snowbanks seemed just a few shades darker in my mind. Do our memories exist through the styles of photographs we’re used to? I can’t think of the my childhood without thinking through those grainy Polaroid scenes that filled the the scrapbooks of my family.
Deep browns, stark black and white, muted clouds tossed over a hazy blue sky. After all, these were the images of my memories. Muted. Tough. Broken. Used. A few rocks remaining in a nearly empty wire bin. The sign bent by weather and time. The loneliness of the empty parking space behind it. A few weeds sprouted out of the wasted ground below. Had the world passed this place by?
I was working with only my 50mm prime lens. I don’t know how any other lens would have looked here. I could have gotten more in with a wider lens…but would that be what it needed? I have to think that these images are not defined by how much is in them but by how much is not…the quiet spaces. The things you wouldn’t even notice were it not for one of those random moments where you stop and fixate on something you’ve seen every day. A name tag on a locker made during a welding lesson for a worker who no longer lives. 
A pile of used pots and containers stacked so deep that it takes on a mountainous beauty all of its own. The dilapidated exposed plywood on the roof of a former cattle barn that was converted to a storage area for a nursery some 60 years ago. In each a story. A story of a rise to prominence over a small local market only to see national “big box” retailers move in and decimate the small family owned business. Each used pot represents a small victory in a losing battle against economic forces and trans-national trade conspiring against a local institution that only looked beyond its own community rarely.
For most of the day as I was walking around, I had a HMC circle polarizing filter on the end of my lens, thinking I might be able to capture some of the deep blues and rich colors the autumn day had provided. It wasn’t until about halfway through that I discovered myself shooting more and more in black and white, the stark boundaries between light and dark highlighted. Back when I was using film, I almost always shot in BW simply because I never quite understood how to make colors really “pop” using film. I still, somewhat nostalgically, look upon post-processing with a little disdain (although obviously since I shoot RAW, it has to happen at some point). The vignetting was a product of stacking a UV filter on the end of the polarizing filter and a little extra help in LR. Is it a gimmick? Or is it how my memories always seem to be visually realized in pictures? There always seems to be something less than what we hope for in digital photography. The desire to be “authentic” and the realistic understanding that “authentic” is always somehow constructed. Yet, if there were any landscape rife for contradiction, it would be the one I was walking around that afternoon.
How did we end up here, and in this way? This was the question everyone asked during my time there. Even from the start, it seemed as though we were always up against something more powerful than ourselves. The buildings themselves seemed like it would come undone at any point, giving way under a weight too heavy for the work out joists to support. Sometimes the question was asked against prevailing social conditions and ideologies. Sometimes the question was leveled against themselves and their situation at a job with no possibility for advancement and riches. Why were we here? What did we stand for? What did we believe in? No one planned to end up there, it just always seemed to work out that way. And while everyone planned on leaving eventually, time and circumstances overtook most.
A little sepia and I’m back in the Garden Shop on those cloudy, chilly autumnal Iowa afternoons and evenings. Saturdays spent with some football game on the small transistor radio, counting the day by in fifteen minute increments. Drizzle would fall occasionally, mixing with the dust and the dirt and the oil that covered every inch of the property. I didn’t realize until these pictures how much the color brown dominates everything. Tickets on the work board in the office limp in their containers, waiting for the work week. Each year I worked there, it seemed as though those containers were filled less and less. The glory days of the nursery were ones I only saw as a small child going to visit my father at work, sitting in the very same wood and metal office chairs in use since the beginning.
I know the history of Platt’s because it is my own history–forever intertwined with who I was and who I became. In the early 1970s, my father (who had only recently himself started working at Platt’s) began courting a young girl who worked across the parking lot in the flowers and bedding plant building of Platt’s. In 1976 they were married. In 1978 they had their first child, Carissa–my older sister.
I grew up in and around Platt’s. Some of my earliest memories are of visiting the nursery during the winter holidays to help select the family Christmas tree. I remember walking through the back corridors to help gather boughs of greens, being suitably impressed by the brisk chill mixed with an intense scent of pine and fir. I started and finished high school while working at Platt’s. I started and finished my undergraduate education while working at Platt’s. There is little of who I am now that does not, in some way, trace a lineage to my time spent around the nursery. Nearly every thing I read while an undergraduate student, I read in the evening while working at Platt’s. And a lot of what I have done in my career as a scholar is rooted very deeply in the experiences I have had as a son of a working class family.
It is this, perhaps, that will be the lasting legacy of Platt’s for me.
Fall has always had special meaning to me, and I guess it is of no surprise that it is autumn that always makes me want to go shoot some pictures more so than other seasons. Part of it, I guess, was that spring time was the busy season for the nursery. Those who work in the trade know that free time is non-existent in the spring as that is when the major business is made. Fall, however, is more of a time of relaxation and contemplation. The world is softer, slower, and less resistant to walking slowly along the edge of the property, feeling the mist in the air mix with the smell of burning leaves and wood.
It was good to be back among these memories…if only for an afternoon.
