There’s something fascinating about decay. Maybe it’s the way man-made things look as they revert back to their natural states, maybe it’s the idea of the slow but inevitable aging process which is often augmented by neglect, maybe it’s just the thought that everything meets the same end but gets there in different ways. Regardless, there is something aesthetically beautiful about things that are not typically considered aesthetically beautiful. Like when a person is conventionally unattractive, but just has ‘something’ about him, there is a raw character about these objects that would not be visible under a fresh coat of paint.
I chose to use a macro lens while taking these pictures, because (besides the fact that I had just gotten the new lens and was really excited to use it) I wanted to capture these subjects the way someone would capture a conventionally beautiful thing, like a dewdrop on a piece of grass, or a flower petal. I wanted to highlight their tiniest intricacies: a piece of chipped paint, a crack in a piece of wood, a rusty nail.
Throughout the process I noticed that decay caused some subjects to take on the properties of their surroundings, and made others stand out. However, all the subjects that I photographed seemed aesthetically far from how they were originally intended to look. And while all these photographs depict nonliving things, I hope that I was able to capture the nuanced individual lives that time and neglect had given them.
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