Something Is Fishy

Annie Bates-Winship had her camera in hand — as she almost always does — when she turned a corner somewhere in Santa Fe and simply stopped. There, parked as casually as any other car on the block, sat a vintage American automobile wrapped from bumper to bumper in a swirling mural of abstract imagery: botanical forms, figures, radiating lines, oceans of blue and green and red all merging into something that felt less like a vehicle and more like a portal. Behind it, the long burnt-sienna wall of an adobe building carried its own painted drama — dark, wing-like shapes sweeping across the surface as if the architecture itself were trying to take flight. Green trees pressed in from above. The street glistened faintly beneath. And the whole scene arranged itself, without asking permission, into a perfect frame. This is exactly the kind of moment Annie's work lives for: the unnoticed, or nearly unnoticed, wonder hiding in plain sight on an ordinary street. Her friend once described looking at her photographs as peering through a peephole into a secret garden — and here, the garden has wheels. She pressed the shutter, and the fleeting became permanent.