A Cow In The Right Light

                                                        SoCal cow, at the Del Mar fair

There is a person, an acquaintance of mine, who claims to have taken a picture of a different person everyday for the past 14 years.

This hobby came about, I was told, in the last year of the 1990's. That was the year of the Y2K paranoia, and though it's hard to believe from the perspective of 2013, there were people then seriously concerned about the calendar turning the corner to the new millennium.

So this photographer friend of mine started taking pictures of people when they would come into the Army-Navy store where she worked at the time. These were everyday, ordinary people who came in to purchase portable generators, two-way radios, water purifiers, solar ovens. That type of thing.

Anywhatzit, the year came and went and nothing happened, but the portrait fixation, the collection of which was kept in a photo album, continued.

Everyday, a new person was greeted and a request was made for a picture. She claims she was only turned down 3 times.

The pictures were all taken with a 35mm camera and printed on film until 2005, when she went digital. Instead of photo albums full of pictures, she now has a small binder full of CD's. She says she has over 5,000 portraits.

We met 10 years ago when she approached me at an art gallery on the corner of Colfax and Pearl and asked if she could take my picture. I had a camera with me and replied that I didn't mind, but only if I could take a picture of her taking a picture of me.

The date I was with at the time took a third picture of the two of us taking pictures of each other, which I should have asked for a copy of, as that date has long since disappeared from my life (she ended up marrying a guy she met online and moving to Florida, If I recall correctly).

The photographer, who now works as a receptionist for a Dentist in Wyoming, which is where she relocated after she got married in 2008 and stayed after she got divorced in 2010, emails me some of the more interesting portraits she shoots. 

Today she sent me a few pictures she had taken at the Cheyenne Frontier Days Rodeo, and all of them were of livestock.

She explained in her email that she had stopped taking pictures of people and has decided to take pictures of livestock from now on.

Which, I suppose could be interesting. Except all of the pictures she sent pretty much looked like pictures of the same cow.

She further explained that she started taking pictures of cows due to people she approached getting suspicious about what she was going to do with the pictures. One woman accused her of wanting her picture to use on a fake dating profile, so she could scam people.

Cows, apparently have no such reservations.