This is the Modern World

"Life is beautiful," you say, "well, it's full of crap, too." Yes, I know. That's a legitimate criticism. In visual art, does the soul just seek beauty? What about awareness of historical context? The photograph stops time, but time doesn't really stop. This past week has been rife with disturbing social history, as every week is, and I resisted putting up a new post here until I saw it as an opportunity to say what I had previously considered. An acknowledgement that the stop-time of beauty requires complication. These below are from Savannah, Georgia, 2009. The first is of the Cotton Exchange, built on an economy made rich by slavery. It was weird to be there (that's me in yellow in the second photograph). Slavery! It seems a world away. It isn't. And, yes, Savannah is beautiful. In the core. Along the highway we viewed slums and suburbs. This is the modern world, past and present, good and bad, the hopeful and the horrible, all mixed up.

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