Themes and variations

Funny how you can look back at the photos you take and see a theme emerging that you never consciously set out to photograph.

One of my themes, cue this photo and the one on my previous post, seems to be small figures seeminly trapped in their urban environment, locked in by clean, inescapable lines on all sides. Lines perhaps also illustrative of Swiss orderliness ! Photos that are alltogether not that joyful, even when in colour - though believe me, as much as I love travelling, I love living in Geneva.

This is quite ironic, as I was for a very long time unable to take any photos in Geneva, precisely because it wasn't quite messy or chaotic enough for my liking !

This harks back to when I travelled in Pakistan in 2001, the second trip where photography featured prominently (the first was only a few months before that, in Morocco, where I met my wife-to-be, though I ended up chucking out all my negatives because the photos had all come out hazy or milky). I became quite fixated on the notion, in my own words, of "junkyard photography", i.e. seeking the geometry and beauty in particulary chaotic locations (such, as, for instance, junkyards).

Stil something I enjoy, as I do believe beauty is to be found everywhere, it's just a matter of seeing it. Cue my photos in the boat yards by the lake in Geneva - though it's fair to say the Swiss have a died-in-the-wool habit of piling even junk in an orderly manner (this may best be seen from the window of a train: farm junk, railroad junk, garage junk etc., all ordered into neat stacks and piles in the corners of fields and yards).