High Summer Issue is on the streets.
Look for the High Summer issue at your favorite winery, farmstand or restaurant. Here's Grist for the Mill to give you a little preview.
Our otherworldly cover photograph by Chuck Close provides a nice metaphor for high summer.
“It’s an amazing process,” said Close, the artist who splits his time between SoHo and a homestead near Mecox Bay, where his wife plants an impressive vegetable garden. Close was referring to daguerreotype, the detailed and expressive photographic process.
“It has an astounding range of grays,” Close continued. “From the brightened whites reflecting
off the polished silver surface to deep dark velvety blacks and everything in between. And it’s not
panchromatic, so it doesn’t read color in a normal way.” In the case of this sunflower, the petals
which we normally see as yellow turn out darker than the flower head which we normally see as
gray. The dark green stem disappears almost entirely. And sort of like an ephemeral sunflower
itself, daguerreotype yields no negative, so it cannot be reproduced, making it all the more precious.
Surreal and precious—not too different from the rushing abundance of August. Anything goes.
The heat dulls our senses and inhibitions and energies enough that we dress down, let our hair
frazzle, and diverge from standard mores.
