Statues in Allerton Park

Another rural Illinois town near Champaign that we travelled to was Monticello, which

 like Tuscola is situated around a grain elevator and railroad. Fifteen minutes past the

 town is Allerton Park, a unexpectedly expansive American Versailles and state park 

with a multitude of classical and Chinese statues. Statues make for interesting subjects

 both as part of a landscape and individually as a portrait so while walking through 

the high walls of topiary I took pictures of statues with a wide aperture for the purpose

 of compositionally isolating them.

I don't see any sense in photographing works of art or monuments or famous sites. 

You always see photos of people huddling around things like the Mona Lisa and 

stretching their point-and-shoots above the throng. I don't get it. Which, of course, doesn't

 mean that I don't do this myself, although when I take pictures of monuments I usually 

pursue a more journalistic perspective to capture an angle that might not have been seen 

or published before by other people. In that sense, it's sort of like turning artwork into 

artwork, if that makes sense.

Monticello

Taken in November 2012