The idea of naming photographs, giving them titles, seems off to me. Like "Evolution" or "The Natural and the Constructed" or "Two Against One" or "Selection: Natural" or so many other things. The file name for this image on my hard drive is "Phone Poles and Trees." That's how I usually name these things; straightforward and honestly. This is a photo of telephone poles and trees. It's not about an abstraction of ideals represented by a tree being distorted by distorted/subverted trees. It's not about the absurdity of process that requires contorting nature to protect infrastructure when a breeze through branches won't damage a power line but when the serious winds arrive that tree is going to fall over and take out those lines in a heart beat. If one were to romanticize it all one might create a narrative where the tree longs to be straight and tall and proud like the phone poles, or maybe the phone poles, by nature of their conformity to a standard, outnumber the tree which is organic and natural and there is a tension between the conformed majority and the marginalized but free individual, the individual oppressed and compromised.
It's easy to project meaning onto the meaningless. But I didn't take a photograph of "Telephone Poles and Trees."
