JOANN VERBURG: I think this piece was shot on a Saturday after Thanksgiving. I was just about to go back to the United States from Italy and in the morning I noticed looking down in the valley that there was fog, little pockets of fog. So I drove out to see what it looked like up close and I went to the place I've been photographing olive trees. I really like the size of the olive trees. They're not that much bigger than a human being. And there were people in and around the trees singing and talking to each other and picking olives. But you couldn't see 'em because of the fog. So it was really quite a wonderful experience.
One of the things that comes through in this particular piece, Thanksgiving, is my interest in Chinese screens. And one of the things I loved about them is that they divided the space up in such a way that you could see one piece of space at a time. And at each of the individual frames there might be a whole sense of a world that would be different in quality and character from the next one over. And in this piece one of the things that I like is that it moves from being extremely abstract in certain places and the scale is close up in certain places. And then in another frame the subject matter is more recognizable in the distance so when you put them all together I think there's a sense that there's not just one way to look at things, there's many ways. It moves the experience of a photograph from being a monocular single minded, only one thing is correct to thinking of it as more layered, more complex.
