Dump Truck

I don’t have a good reason for photographing that truck. It was parked on Salisbury Road, and something about it stopped me.

The orange. A saturated orange, sitting against a wall of dark green pine. Then the flecks of red down the truck’s flank, small and repeated, breaking up all that flat colour. Then the light: low sun cutting through the trees, dropping shadow across the cab and the bed in stripes, so the same yellow paint read as three or four different shades depending on where the sun landed.

None of that is a plan. I noticed it, and I stopped, and I composed the frame, and I pressed the shutter. That’s what photography was for me that morning — not chasing a subject, but reacting to a combination of colour and light that won’t repeat itself the same way twice.

The truck itself belongs to the Township of Montgomery. Its door carries the municipal seal, and reading it is its own small pleasure: working from the outer ring to the centre, top to bottom, it reads The Township of Montgomery, in the County of Somerset, Incorporated Seal, February 21, 1798, New Jersey. A working vehicle, doing a working vehicle’s job, stamped with a date from before photography existed at all.