This photo ‘apocalyptic summer’ was an image made in Rochester near the end of summer. While driving around in the city I observed a group of young children playing in a fire hydrant. Initially, I was ambivalent about pursuing a subject matter that has been so heavily exploited by others, so I challenged myself to represent this scene in a way that replaced cliche with intrigue. Instead of contributing to the continuation of this subject’s sentimental posterity, I, chose to subtract and isolate the subject from its context/environment and make my image at an awkward moment of digression. The retreating gesture of the child combined with the sublime beauty and chaos of a scene abstracted by its stillness portends or implies rather, a consequential peril and undermines the playfulness otherwise, classically, associated with photographs of children playing in the rain or beneath the misty canopy of a geysering fire hydrant.