This picture was something I shot kind of in passing. I’d just been looking at the driftwood sculptures on the beach of the small west coast town of Hokitika when as I left the beach I saw this window.

The window belongs to a little house that looks out across beach road to the Tasmin Sea. A little neglected and weather beaten this beach facing window stopped me because of the two little characters standing in the window that reminded me the iconic painting, American Gothic by Grant Wood.

I have no idea who owned this house or what they looked like, but it seemed to me that the house was in some ways quite similar to the house seen in that famous painting, and therefore maybe the people inside we similar to the people in the painting also. I imagined the ageing decor inside. An old kitchen with an old stove and wooden table. A sitting room with a fireplace and two old chairs facing the kind of TV that doesn’t have a remote and takes a while to warm up when it’s switched on. And a hallway with a dark and well worn carpet, a musty old smell and a wind up clock keeping track of time, as best it can, for purely ornamental reasons these days.

It seemed to me, or to my imagination at least, that time was not as important to this old house as it might have been one day.