MINAMISANRIKU, Japan — Six months after Japan's deadly earthquake and tsunami, the naked steel frame of the former Disaster Management Center stands like a tombstone over the flattened field of weed-covered debris that was once this town's center.
Outside the house was a field of weeds, twelve feet high.
Most of the sites Ractliffe selects are desolate (a field of weeds, a capsized boat, a graveyard), and the resulting pictures can sometimes feel puzzling.
The house, designed by Fay Jones, a Wright protégé, had cost seven million dollars already; it sits unfinished in a field of weeds.
Also in Mississippi, a close-up of hard-bitten carnival people at a county fair, and a view of ghostly abandoned farm buildings in a field of weeds project a less-than-upbeat vision of rural America.
A field of weeds containing species only recently introduced to the community is quite different from a rich interactive web of indigenous species that have had the time to adapt to one another.
It stands out like an exotic flower in a field of weeds when a generation or two of United fans is experiencing, for the first time, what it is like to witness a team that is vulnerable every single week.
On a haunting Edo period screen titled "The Plain of Musashi," for instance, a low silver moon (now oxidized to black) seems to nestle in a field of weeds and wildflowers.
The only surprises about Sanford Silver, family and friends say, are the facts of his death, his slender body found beaten, bound with tape and dumped in a field of weeds near Coney Island Creek.
He came home, gazed at a field of weeds, brush and poison ivy in an empty lot off Riverside Lane, turned to his friend Justin Currytto, 17, and proclaimed: "If we build it, they will come".
