What's in an image? What do you see?
Roots. Are they edible? A harvest of sorts or overgrown weeds?
Hands. Presumably the gardener. Big hands. Is this a woman or a man? Is he/she proudly displaying the results of their labor?
While each viewer will create their own story, here is what this image means to me. We are back in Israel, reconnecting with our roots. for me, a big part of this is returning to the garden I left behind two years ago. It is heartbreaking to see it invaded by aggressive, out of control plants to the point where some think it should be scratched, the soil replaced (or worst yet, poisoned to kill all invaders) and start from scratch. Ten years of work down the drain. I refuse to accept, for now, while evaluating the options, I fight the invaders. I know it is too little too late, but I still spend a couple of hours the other day on my hand and knees, digging and trying to uproot the weeds. The garden was always "my place". My husband helps carry the compost, but other than that, he just takes pride in "his gardener wife". Yesterday, he saw me fighting what seemed to be small nice leaves that turned our to be connected to a carrot like root ten times their size. Without thinking, he picked up the fork and started digging. He digs, I pull. It's the eve of Yom Kippur, people dressed in white, going to the synagogue - we are wearing shorts, dirty and sweaty, fighting the weeds. When we were done, I asked him to wait, grabbed my camera with my favorite 50mm prime lens and took a few photographs of his hands holding the uprooted plants. To me, this image speaks volumes about what's below the surface, a portrait of our relationship.