Gritty

It happens to everybody, I am sure, that you find yourself somewhere and it seems to be blasted, brutal, boring, or ugly, and it’s easy to say, ‘there’s nothing here.’ I think that in those moments it is precisely the time to look harder, to try and see something, even  when your wish is to be somewhere else. And looking harder then may still not pay off, but one never knows.

I walked around this particular town looking for a place that I was told did metalwork, and of course those kinds of places are often in parts of town that are deteriorating, so when I came to this gritty spot with its hacked trees, crumbling steps, and failing masonry, I was ready to move on. But something in the physical space nagged at me momentarily and made me lift the Leica to my eye. Maybe it was just the relative scale of some of the forms, or was it the overall tonal similarity on this grey day. Who can say? But for some reason it called me to spend a few minutes there looking at the parts and absorbing the feelings the place gave off, before moving on.

It is that call to instinct that serves me even when an image fails to be a ‘keeper.’

Nota Bene: Some readers pointed out to me that the Wunderkabinet image the other day had a Squirrel not a Rabbit and I realize that I saw squirrel and mistakenly typed rabbit. So thank you for being so observant.