Harbor

A small harbor in Vietnam on Cát Bà. It’s a place hundreds of tourists pass each day. I wonder how many of them take a photo there though.

Taken one day earlier, this image for me illustrates a completely different world of construction from the photo of the Hong Kong-Zhuhua-Macau Bridge yesterday. It’s the invisible and quickly forgotten places in-between, the driveways, beltways, and parking places of this world. All that stuff connected to “infrastructure” and “logistics.” (The playgrounds for mafia movies, The Wire, and many of Ballard’s stories.)

Places like these often violate our aesthetic senses so carefully pruned by photo sharing apps, advertisement, TV. They seem lost, trashed, and forgotten. Being made of concrete and steel, smelling of rubber and petrol, they are the opposite of the green future many imagine. If for some reason we end up there, we hope to leave soon. It’s places to cross, not to stay at.

And yet, these places are work places and homes too! There are sun rises and sunsets, plants and birds, colleagues, jokes, and maybe love affairs or rivalries. I remember places like these from summer jobs and research projects. (Not too many though, I’m biographically quite a snowflake when it comes to that.) Thanks to my camera, I learned again to look differently at these places, and I am grateful for that.