January 29, 2017

Hate Takes Root
Bozeman, Montana
2017

I don’t usually let my photography drift very far in the depressingly negative direction; for one thing, that’s not really my general nature (cynical yes, but not depressingly negative). But yesterday I started messing with this photo of weathered roots on a dead tree that had been exposed by an eroding riverbank and it unintentionally started looking very dark and sinister. So I went with the mood, accentuating it and adding the scowling eyes in the center. The name came easily after reading the day’s news from Washington.

As a point of interest, the eyes came from a gorilla I photographed at a zoo some years ago. There are also other features that, depending on your imagination, could be construed to look like other beings. I see a scary, almost goat-like face and an associated pair of sinister looking hand. As the acronym generation would say though, YMMV.