Retired Workforce
As I have grown up here in Cedar City I have always been going out to farms with my dad to get hay or help someone with something. These activities have shown me a side of Cedar City that used to be commonplace but are now fading away. This community used to be primarily a farming and mining town and is now growing into a bigger city and people are abandoning these old traditions of work and finding new types of vocation.
So I decided that I would showcase the remains of this old working culture by searching all the rural areas surrounding Cedar City. I wanted to show these remnants of machinery for a lot of different reasons. I think that by looking at them you can see a story of how the owner worked, whether it was well maintained or if the person was poor and used unconventional methods of fixing it or not. And I think that the other story that is told is one of time, weather and wear and tear that these old relics go through. Some have been vandalized and some seem to be in great condition despite its adversity.
I wanted to make compositions with lots of geometric shapes and dissecting lines to let a person really feel the complexity or simplicity of each of these machines. Some that I photographed are very well made and seem to have mechanics ahead of their time and other things I looked at were just reminders of logic and simplicity of passed years. I chose to show these in color because I feel like they are already a forgotten memory and I wanted to revitalize my subject and show it in a way that I think that most people haven't seen these types of things.
Over all I had a great time thinking of these things and giving myself an excuse to get out to new places to find these Retired Workers to show them from my point of view. It was a lot of cold mornings and a good amount of walking but it was all worth the while. I hope that my views can be appreciated by letting people realize that there can be beauty in everything, even a broken down tractor that most would just consider to be an eyesore.