What Collins Saw

You Can Observe A Lot Just By Looking

Rural Vermont, December, time to slaughter the steers for winter meat. I don’t eat mammals, but most people do. The head of the steer who was first to go seems to still not understand what happened.

This could be a sordid story. But maybe not. Perhaps this guy was abused by the priest when he was a kid and he seeks a confession from the priest! It is taking place at a 2001 outdoor ceremony for Little Audrey, a Worcester MA child who had been in a coma since a near drowning years before and whom the church was positioning as someone through whom miracles happened and who just might become a saint. A couple times a year Audrey's parents and the church conspired to hold these public events promoting the unconscious creature, and people would come from great distances seeking to be healed of ailments by viewing her. And the Catholic priests would set up shop hawking their forgiveness channeled through the Deity, perhaps themselves praying that no former altar boy would show up with murder in his heart.

Audrey finally gave up her ghost in 2007 at the age of 24, unconscious since the age of four. I'll find a photo of her at one of her ceremonies and put it up to pick up this thread at a later date.

Valentine's Day in Worcester, MA, 1999

Are all photographs stories, or narratives? Not a macro shot from nature, as below, perhaps, though there must be a story there too, about the travels of insect larvae, but certainly these two friends having lunch together, above, perhaps unaware of the Valentine's Day sign above them, present some possibilities of a story line?