Bonnie*B
You Can Do Better
There’s a lot to be said for the photographer who spends her time noticing the beauty in the ordinary or the abused, finding glory by peeking into an overlooked corner of a grubby urban landscape and turning up a warmly rusty glow or a particular combination of colors that converts peeling paint into intricate cartography, splashes of graffiti into high art. There are many true wonders to be found in even the most barren of cityscapes.
Yet for me, there is a greater treasure. There is the photographer who recognizes a certain kind of sublime ugliness and fairly revels in her unlovely find—who doesn’t transform a cast-off shopping cart into a symbol of exquisite existential desrepair, but instead shows us its jilted form without pretending it is more than what it is: a dirty metal thing lying on its side in a thin layer of mucky snow. If this deliciously disagreeable scene is a symbol of anything it is only an (overturned) monument to our own self-centered laziness.
And like this photographer, the weather—this winter at least—refuses to draw a snowy veil over the petty sins and warts of the world.
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, meerasethi and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
