Beauty in Bleakness

One day late in the afternoon, I found myself walking around a desolate downtown area. The place wanted to be more than what it was. There was really nothing holding it back. There was no real reason why its streets should have been as bereft of life as they were. Shop spaces were well kept, the sidewalks and streets were clean, yet I was one of only a few other people who were spending time there. I just didn’t get it.

After I got the sense that I had done what I was going to do with my camera that day, I started to wrap things up. I happened to look up and see a pair of windows that caught my eye.

There was something about this ostensibly unremarkable scene that intrigued me. The building was perhaps an example of late Art Deco design or of the kind of cold steel minimalism that one sees in midcentury architecture. One window had drapes, and its top pane was cracked open for air. Maybe someone I couldn’t see was up there. The matching pane on the other window was closed, and it had no drapery. Both windows were similar but different. The angle of my perspective added an interesting dimension to what I saw.

I snapped a photo without thinking too much more about it. At the time, I didn’t think it would make my editing cut once I got home and had a closer look at my photographs. But the more I looked at the image, the more it grew on me.

When I’m out and about, I like to capture a sense of what it feels like to experience a place or event. Rather than engage in a hopeless attempt at some kind of objectivity in my photography, I like for the images I make to convey some deeper gut feeling that I experienced at the time that I make them.

There was a certain beauty in the bleakness of the place I experienced that afternoon. It’s compelling enough for me to want to explore that beauty more in the future.