Picturette Manifesto

I hereby introduce the concept of picturettes.

Pictures of "irrelevant" things.

Weedy plants, graffiti on the back side of public restrooms, plants: things that no tourist would want to take pics of.

Cutlery, sidewalk tiles, bricks.

Pure blue sky, shaky city lights, small flourishes on mass-produced things.

Everyone takes photos of big places, but you can just Google them to find near-identical copies.

It's the small, unassuming elements that truly set that place apart from others.

Those "mistakes" or "undesirable imperfections" are what truly reflect the local population. The wabi-sabi of a moment. How that place feels lived in.

I've taken a bunch of such pictures. Pictures without the notion of composition: just the raw desire of registering interesting textures, plants, things.

I think that picturettes show a more candid side of a country and its people. For better or for worse, it is more organic than taking a picture of a place that is definitely engineered to be a tourist spot.

Tourist spots look well-kept because it draws attention from people all over the world, and their big expectations need to be met. But those smaller insights are often left to the common masses: it is emergent, naïve, and vernacular.

I have a big appreciation to this organic approach to art and nature.

People do their best to kill off weedy plants, clean the sidewalk and paint over graffiti, but even those things have their own small story that justifies their reason to exist.

It doesn't mean I agree with everything I've taken a picture of, of course. However, as an aspiring artist, it would be short-sighted to flatly ignore them.

Picturettes aren't clichés. There has been a lot of talk around liminal spaces, but I guess picturettes could be an example of "marginal spaces". And they are indeed quite insightful.

Personally, liminal spaces do not interest me. An artificial place meant to be transitory, and purposefully designed not to be contemplated, feels shallow and not very inviting for introspection.

I think that true depth comes from analyzing things that actually exist in a "raw" state. Picturettes do not require any special, technical effort. It is as candid as it gets.

In short,

Liminal spaces = pondering an environment that isn't meant to be contemplated.

Picturettes = pondering an environment that people chose not to contemplate.

Marginalization is a policy. To ignore or overlook something, or to cast it out of sight or out of bounds, has political motivation. Therefore, to acknowledge it photographically is to acknowledge its existence.

Finding beauty in picturettes can recontextualize places that were once considered "boring" or "uninteresting". I always enjoyed taking casual pictures, but I often felt the lack of drive to take them. "Why would I want to? There's nothing interesting in my city."

But then I wondered, what is "interesting", after all?

I realized that the quality of being "interesting" has been constructed in my mind, artificially. I've been conditioned to think that interesting things have to be bombastic.

And yet, nature exists everywhere, the sky exists everywhere. There's no reason to think that the place I live in is not interesting.

At the end of the day, we consume things with meaning; but we can create things with meaning, too. We can construct new frames, freely, if we so choose.

Plants are timeless, geography is timeless, and people are always evolving. And yet, these are all temporary and will disappear. Perhaps there will be new plants and buildings to take their place, but my photos will keep a record of a very specific instant in time and space, and be special because I saw beauty in them.

Perhaps currently what we consider uninteresting, would in fact become tantalizing in the near or far future.