Crop Damage in Florida

let’s set the scene:

the longest, coldest stretch of winter weather in florida in over 80 years.

~$100 MILLION lost in southwest florida alone.

EVERY county has been declared a disaster area, because EVERYONE lost ~30% of their crops.

farm workers out of work, nothing to harvest.

millions of dollars worth of equipment, just sitting there.

flies. alot of flies.

…..and yet, an air of nonchalance from both the congressmen and the heads of the farms. turns out alot of the small-time farmers around here rent/lease the land from farming conglomerates like Alico. And guess who gets to sit at home, wallowing in uncertainty and grief, while the farmer with THOUSANDS of acres of diversified product, the one who will still survive, gets carted out for the cameras to gladhand with the bureaucrats?

this is where i SHOULD be talking about how viewing disaster through a viewfinder provides the kind of detachment that keeps one from emotionally crumbling.

the difference on this day was that the comforting monocular blue-gray glow of my panasonic was emotionally detaching me from an already emotionally detached scenario.

people are going to be RUINED by the cold spell. people are going to be homeless, or killing themselves, or will be unable to send their kid to college over this shit. and here are a couple senators and a farm baron’s 4th-in-command cackling and back-slapping amongs rows of ACTIVELY ROTTING LIVELIHOOD. of…life.

and here I was, face buried in viewfinder, totally consumed with shutter and aperature settings…requiem for a conscience, right?

no.

i can understand the bank teller sitting on the couch with a microwave dinner not really understanding the magnitude of the damage. only thinking about how all those melted, rotten peppers are going to amount to an extra $4.38 on her next sweetbay reciept. she hasnt seen just how far those fields stretch in every direction, or how thoroughly destroyed each individual plant is. she can’t smell the decomp, she isnt getting dive-bombed by bees and having flies wander up her shirt sleeves…

so it’s my job to grab that scenario, and plop it down right next to her on the loveseat. to make her feel it.

now you’d think that in order to make it as real as possible, i should just shoot it raw. no shutter, no bokeh, no over-the-top shot composition, just show the scene. hell, many a news director would say something very much to that effect.

so why make it look so…cinematic? (jackies words, not mine) well if it was a bank robbery or a rollover on the interstate, that’s exactly what you’d get from me. and from pretty much every other photog in our market.

and that’s why i put so much effort into making it look…surreal. (my words, not jackies)

our bank teller has had a rough day at work. she’s got a choice between a 4.6% pay cut, or 5 furlough days per quarter for the next 2 quarters. she’s got 2 kids throwing their tyson chicken nuggets at each other across the living room. she’s eating around the pieces of her cavatappi genovese that the microwave didn’t quite get to. she’s watching the news on auto.

rollover, city council meeting, the measures the zoo is taking to keep its monkeys warn tonight. some plane crash in mississippi. and all of it looks like….news.

then, she sees what looks like a movie about a biblical plague ravaging the croplands of some fictional eastern nation. everything looks…surrreal, cinematic…emotional.

but…

the WINK news logo is still rotating in the bottom-left corner.

she’s hearing the voice of the same collier county reporter that was on yesterday in a county commission meeting.

the lower-third resolves, and it says “east naples”.

…and that incongruence, that visual departure, slaps her in the face. demands her attention. and she tunes out the thuds of nuggets versus floor tile, and she puts the fork down. and she watches, and listens, a little harder.

and gets a little bit closer to comprehending the utter devastation.

…and feels it.