water horse

Evidently, I'm still playing around with the plastic ponies, trying to get used to their photographic vagaries: this one is climbing out of a plant pot by the front door that's completely awash after yesterday's heavy rain.   That pale ochre object over on the left hand side is a floating peanut - one of the many that have been buried around here by the squirrels.

There's a whole community - not one that I'll be joining... - of plastic horse photographers on line, I find: they have their own virtual horse shows, customizing their model equines (as I used to do when I was 9 or 10, admittedly), photographing them, and then submitting their images to be judged.   But they don't seem to pose them in quasi surreal settings (though there are, indeed, a couple of Breyer horses for sale on eBay that look as though they are grazing in lush and expensive paddocks), but go in for far more amateur hobby-ing, buying artificial grass (why?) and trees and fences, as well as stables and tack and all kinds of other accoutrements.   Now, again, I used to buy things with which to furnish my model stables: I'm sure that the person who sold me a pack of doll's house cleaning tools (plastic bucket, broom, etc) at the Wimbledon High School summer fete didn't think that these were going to be rushed home, unpacked, and instantly deployed as a feeding-and-mucking-out kit).   But these photographers seem to be adults, and extremely serious about their pursuit: there are even people out there attempting to make - well, probably, supplement - a living setting themselves up as model horse photographers - you send them yours, and they'll be captured grazing and prancing around a plastic studio.   This is a sub-group of professional photography that had never even crossed my mind that it existed.

Somewhere at the back of my mind is the work of an art photographer who, like me, has tried to recreate her childhood relationships with imaginary horses - I can't for the life of me remember who ... when I saw her work a year or so back I remember thinking Damn!  I'd been wanting to do this... I'll post a link if and when I find this - I don't think it's Joanne Leonard, who admittedly has at least one strange knight on horseback in her work - suggestions/memory jogs welcome...