Convergence

Today's cover article in the NYTimes Sunday Magazine is by Alex Kuczynski, who writes about her own experience of having another woman carry her baby -- i.e., the product of Kuczynski's egg & her husband's sperm -- because of her own difficulty in carrying a pregnancy to term.  (This process is called "gestational surrogacy," I believe.)  I haven't read the article yet, but certainly plan to.

What caught my eye thumbing through the magazine, though, was a photograph accompanying the article taken by Gillian Laub.  It depicts Kuczynski on the left holding her newborn baby, and her baby nurse (not the woman who gave birth to the child) on the right, standing in front of Kuczynski's Southampton home:

I've been reading Lawrence Weschler's "Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences," in which he riffs on seemingly unlikely visual (and literary) associations occurring in a myriad of contexts throughout history and across cultures and media. So, naturally, my thoughts drifted to a very similar picture taken by William Eggleston in Sumner, Mississippi, in the early 1970s:

I don't know if Laub had this image in mind when she took hers. But the placement of the figures, and the oddly plantation-like setting of Kuczynski's Southampton home (lushly green, and neo-classical columns on a porch to boot), reminded at least this viewer of Eggleston's timeless image of the deep South.