Photographer's note:

When "Agave #1" (left) was removed prior to competition because it was deemed a "duplicate" of "Agave #2 (right) -- hence, a violation of the rules -- an opportunity arose to compare the two photographs. The following descriptions are intended to evoke the differences, but also to show how metaphor may be used to suggest how similar images manifest their expressive content differently. It is important to note that among the tools critics employ (and artists and photographers are critics of their own works in the same way as are non-creators) is the use of literary images to convey or suggest ideas. Such essays are rarely literal or even meant literally, but merely serve to offer subjective verbal cognates or to evoke an otherwise inexpressible content.

In the first of these (left), the agave seems to be lit by a cool glowing moon-like, nearly artificial light that emanates from its core -- the colors seem moderately desaturated. The plant illuminates itself quietly and emotionless like those deep-sea fish that drift in the ocean's opaque depths, carrying their own lights. The nearly unmodulated surface is velvety and reluctant to reveal details, producing the effect of the stillness of night and the quiet subdued appearance of inactivity and inevitable sleep -- I think of Diana, goddess of the moon -- distant and withdrawn, but always aware and watching.

In contrast, the internal light at the core of "Agave #2" is white furnace-hot, and the leaves expand and flex with strident contrasts, with muscular rigor and fire-like tension, so much so, that at times it seems to rip through the very surfaces and fiber of the leaves. In some places the leaves evoke burning embers. This one I think of as a metaphor of the breaking sun of early morning or of something hot and tortured an expression of the desert. I think of the two images as different as are night and day -- visually and emotionally and symbolically. Of course, viewers needn't endorse my metaphors, but, at least, they should serve to indicate that the differences are significant.

Continuing: The first suggests an inbred sickly quality as if its spirit is decaying from the moral fault of isolation and from lack of external stimulation, while the second appears to be consuming itself with its own energy. In my mind I think of them as potential illustrations for Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs du Mal." Obviously, there are erotic components in these images that need no explanation, but to put my own metaphors to work, I think of them as phases of a fictional pictorial drama that might be entitled "Georgia O'Keefe's Season in Hell."