When Ugly is Beautiful
The building is ugly but the photo intriguing. Why? Hey, Stella! recalls the dilapidated New Orleans tenement of the Tennessee Williams play Streetcar Named Desire. It has the color coordination and deliberate jumble of a stage set. It’s abandoned yet still, somehow, alive.
The building in Ice, although condemned, is touched by The tree of Life; but the tree is itself as crooked and dusty as the tenement.
The house in Gateway 39 is old, decrepit and overgrown. Yet it preserves the solemn dignity of a venerable family, an outdated aesthetic or a forgotten idea.
Green House was once purposeful, literally a warm and well-lighted place, now locked, abandoned, and broken. Yet it seems to yearn for a new beginning.
The structure in Broken is bulging and gravid. What lies behind its shattered, dusty panes could be shriveled and sickly or it could be monstrous.
The house in Gateway 88 was once welcoming and sunny, making the snake-like chain seems out of place. The soft, yellow pillars cry out, “let the sunshine in!”
When is ugly beautiful? Ugly is ugly when there is disorder, a miscellany of objects, colors, and moods. Ugly becomes beautiful when some underlying harmony of color or design is preserved. A pile of garbage is ugly; an abandoned house provokes pathos and the memory of an antiquated aesthetic. The job of photography is to capture moods, colors, and memories, old and new, ugly and beautiful.
Lastly, sometimes beautiful is beautiful, as in “Pra não dizer que não falei das flores”.