Ben Bloom - A Cow Was Walking Towards a Creek
Ben Bloom is a film photographer and creative director from the Bay Area, currently living in New Zealand. His work is influenced by waves of narration and the internal dialogue that takes place during long walks on the beach. Here, we talk with Ben about the manifestation of home in his most recent photo book A cow was walking towards a creek.
Photographic excerpts and the second half of Ben’s interview are featured in our latest print issue: Home.
words by Ben Bloom:
From my series and photo book "A cow was walking towards a creek,” these photographs follow my experience of coming back home after a year away due to pandemic travel restrictions. The project documents the small town of Point Reyes, a rural yet progressive community of ranchers, hippies, artists, and working class. With an unspoken harmony between opposing opinions, the town breaks the constructs of the current divisive climate that exists in almost every other part of California. They coexist over common ground, or in this case, common water. The town is surrounded, supported, and made unique by the water; something that I found to be an interesting metaphor for the undercurrent of my home culture.
Could you speak more about your experience of returning home after a year away?
Besides obvious change from the pandemic, coming back to any place you’ve been away from always reminds you how much has stayed the same. I think it’s easy to convince yourself that the world moves so much when you’re gone but in reality it’s not always true. For lack of a better word, it just felt easy. And I think that’s kind of the point of home.
Do you feel like the pandemic, and your time away from home, impacted your idea of, and relationship to home?
It’s made my relationship with home much less defined. I haphazardly found a place halfway across the world that I now feel equally as attached to as the one my friends and family live in. It was interesting to shoot this project and try to capture a sense of place along with a sense of feeling, knowing that I was split between these two places that I considered home.
On coexistence,
The last year of events has created a compoundingly divisive climate – not just in the Bay Area – but all over the world. People have retreated further into their beliefs and seem progressively less understanding and sympathetic of an opposing view. Point Reyes is an interesting place in this regard, it’s been inhabited by a mix of left and right wing ideals for years. In contrast to places like San Francisco whose population leans almost entirely to one end, Point Reyes seems to successfully host an contrasting mix. The town is historically inhabited by ranchers and farmers but became a recluse for a lot of alternative thinkers in the 60’s and 70’s. That mix of mindsets has carried into the current culture and remains an integral part of the town’s culture.
Just to note, I have no doubt there’s still some divisive aspects of Point Reyes that I’m not tuned into so I hope this observation isn’t completely naive but from my perspective it does host a contrasting mix of beliefs with a fairly uncontentious atmosphere.
Could you tell us more about the story behind title of your book?
The title of the book comes from a famous column in the local newspaper called “Sheriff's Calls”. Every week they publish all of the phone calls made to the local police station. It’s become a fixture of the paper and although it’s had its criticism, it seems to be an integral part of the weekly news. Each entry is written matter-of-factly, making it unintentionally more entertaining. As I was working on the project, I was looking at a backlog of the columns for ideas to title the book and that’s when I came across “At 2:21am A cow was walking toward a creek”. There was something about the objectivity of it, the odd need to even mention such a mundane event – but it totally resonated with all the themes that were spinning through my head, right back to this idea of water.
