RECOLLECTING

I’M LOOKING AT THE GRAIN ELEVATOR across the street from our rental house in Palouse, Washington, realizing that I don’t have any idea how a grain elevator works. I imagine the grain levitating up the shaft and through some portal. Lately, an illusive (and elusive) element has been threading itself through my rural life: I know that the grain doesn’t fall up the elevator, but I can’t get the image out of my mind.

I see this in June’s recent images. Fran is hunched, holding herself framing her own body sitting on the ground, which in turn frames place. June has an uncanny ability to translate the rurality that we call home into a dialect that feels lived in, and yet secret, private: “If you know, you know,” as it were. Portraiture, in the right hands, lets people appear as they are, not as they ought to be, or what outside forces deem them to be; they appear with the photograph/photographer conflated into one being, acting as a facilitator for recognition of a particular light that threads itself through a subject’s own light — a secret given and received and told, with the subject’s permission, to the onlooker.