an abiding fascination…
Most of our holidays come in a box.
We go along with it. Do it for the kids. Guilt our way through. Fulfill our requisite purchases of pre-made plastic crap.
But Halloween is different
Somehow as we go into the darkness of autumn, at least in this part of New England, people kick it up a little. For a culture that‘s notoriously averse to dealing with death, there are quite a few cheerfully morbid, recklessly creative folks who do their best to play with us about all this.
For years, as I drive around in the autumn I've photographed homemade effigies. These are from southern New Hampshire and northern Massachusetts.
There are some great ones that got away. Some were impossible to photograph because of traffic or timing: a bicycle ditched against a hedge on a tight curve in Seabrook, legs protruding from the shrubbery; a guy in a chair holding an umbrella in the rain. For every dozen storebought Raggedy Anns there's a genius out there.
Keep playing. It’s later than you think.
