In a world of many flavors

Okay.  True Confession: Not everything I shoot is beautiful.  In fact, I have this not-all-that-secret love of aging surfaces with intriguing geometrics.  I have hundreds of pictures of walls, and floors, and sides of buildings, all in various stages of decay that I find... beautiful.

In my more cynical moments I suspect I shoot these things looking for beauty in the same way I look for beauty in the mirror; I am to some extent reassuring myself that even the not-technically-beautiful has beauty.  But if that's the case, it's not any kind of conscious decision.  Because I'm really drawn to images like this one.  I don't even know why -- I just am.

I'm only bringing this up now because I discovered another painter whose work I really appreciate (Margareta Jungerth Boo) and when I went to the site where much of her works are displayed I discovered she's also a photographer, and has a photo fetish quite similar to mine.  The difference is, she shows hers proudly, while I -- with one exception (an entire show built around enhanced photos of the ferry floor) -- keep them sort of under the counter. You can see them if you ask, but mostly I don't bother; I just don't think people will be interested.

I've been thinking about that a lot today.  We've been reading letters written by my husband's father back in the 50's, and he DID bother.  About EVERYthing.  Not in the kind of icky entitled way that people fuss these days, but with an absolute clarity of purpose.  He had strong opinions on what was right and wrong, appropriate and inappropriate, and he didnt hesitate to let people know when he thought they weren't properly carrying out their duties.  Though his sons got those strong opinions too, they -- like apparently most of my generation -- don't tend to speak out as boldly as he did.

I wonder if that isn't because our generation has begun to understand -- with the current information explosion -- that truth, like beauty, comes in many flavors.  But once we see that, we can't help but begin to wonder if anything is fully true, or wholly beautiful, and so we cease to assert our own versions of what we find to be truthful or beautiful. Which is exactly the opposite of what we should be doing: we need to find a way to say what we know to be true for us without demanding that it be true for everyone else.  If we are called to work together to find some approximation of what the whole truth might be, we need all the different visions and possibilities we can get to round out the picture.