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From: Jasper
Date: Friday August 18, 2006
Time: 03:32:03 AM
Lollie, …The “Say it ain’t so, Joe” sign had to be moved to open the gate. Unlike the Rockingham gate, the Ashford gate is really two gates, hinged on both sides of the driveway and coming together in the middle. ………… That’s one of the odd things about the sign as it appears in the Corbis archives. The sign-maker selected a lettering style and COMPOSITION that conjures up images of signs people take to televised sporting events and hold up for the camera. The artist drew the letters, colored them with a Magic Marker and cut off a portion of the poster board to give it the optimum size and shape for the size, style and readability of the letters. ………… The only reason for going though the trouble to make that sign is to insure that it is photographed with the display site in mind. The operative words are “photographed” and “display site.” You don’t lean a sign that took several hours to compose and execute against the part of a gate that could open at any time leaving the sign flat on the ground. You do it to put the sign in the best place for a photograph. You set up the shot for the photographer. He takes several photos with someone moving the sign a little to the left or right between shots to get the best one. Then you move the sign out of the way for traffic in and out of the gate. …………The “Say it ain’t so, Joe” sign is a composition within a composition. The house, the GATE, the IVY covered GATE POSTS, the driveway, the WALKWAYS, the lawn, the FLOWERS, the CAR and the driveway taking your eyes to the sign create the larger composition. Here, you have every major component of the Mothers poem photo plus the baseball bat incident that Fuhrman wrote about in his 1989 “spouse abuse” letter. In other photos you can see that the flowers on the far walkway to the house are delphiniums – just as they are in the Mothers poem photo with the paper leaning against the delphiniums and the delphiniums leaning against the corner of the gate. You can’t open that gate, either, without tipping over the message or moving it. ……….. I suspect that Fuhrman talked someone into putting up the “Say it ain’t so, Joe” sign for a camera shot and positioned himself to move it. That’s what I think we would have seen if the Mother’s poem hadn’t worked out, Fuhrman “moving” the sign out of the way. –Jasper