Camera Ornament

The Camera Ornament is a black glass SLR with a silver lens barrel, a wound strap detail along one side and a shutter button that will never depress. The barrel is built up over the black body in several passes so the lens carries actual depth instead of reading as a painted circle. It hangs wider than it is deep, which means it faces out from a front branch and holds its own beside much larger pieces. At three and a quarter inches across it is one of the wider pieces here, and it sets the spacing for whatever hangs next to it. My neighbor Ellery photographs everything and shows no one, keeping thirty years of negatives in a chest freezer he bought specifically and has never once plugged in. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame exists in part because somebody in the eleventh row had a camera and no particular plan for the pictures, which strikes me as a reasonable case for keeping one within reach of the door.