It’s late Saturday morning, I was not able to post Thursday’s images yesterday. Let’s try it now 🙂
Wednesday night I had plenty of images for my SoFoBoMo book, but now that I don’t have the need for numbers, I’m beginning to get picky 🙂
The problem is, that there are many ways to interpret my topic “Urban Dreams”. So far I have the following groups:
First there are architectural images about roofs, balconies, about where the city meets the sky, about the place where we all want to live, although that’s technically impossible. I think it qualifies as a dream, and among dreams it is a dream generally dreamed by urban people.
I have plenty of these images, definitely more than I need, but here are two more, the first of them with our humble Austrian version of patriotism 🙂
The second group contains images dealing with the hope for wealth and with the lack thereof. These are about lottery games, social outcasts, and posters and stickers with political agitation.
I could use more of those, and some days ago I have recognized that I have not taken a single image of right-wing, nationalist agitation. Don’t get me wrong: there’s plenty of that as well in Austria, it is only so disgusting to me, that I shy away from using it.
The problem is, there is a very positive dream in communism, and in fact what the world really needs at this moment, is exactly a piece of that dream. It’s only that communism tends to fail due to the competitive nature of man, it’s not that the dream at the core would not be a positive utopia.
Right-wing nationalist propaganda of the loosely disguised neo-fascist kind, the type that is prevalent under Europe’s right-populist parties, completely lacks that pure core. It is not good intention failing, it is only speculation on the worst sentiments of mankind: avarice, resentment, envy, prejudice, and it works because it appeals to the stupid.
Recently asked about my estimation of the potential for those right-wing populists, I answered “about 30-35%”. Think of Hitler: He was elected and he got 30%. I don’t think he would have got more in any valid, democratic election. Haider never got more. And of those who voted for them, only a small core of maybe 5% really shared their whole spectrum of political opinions. The rest is a wildly fluctuating mix of people who feel underrepresented by the traditional parties, by those parties that at least sometimes try to really solve problems instead of creating them.
Anyway. Now you know my reason for not including right-nationalist-populist propaganda: there is no dream at the core.
The next group is that of images in landscape format that are vertically split in two halves. I added three of them in the last post, today we get three more. I will definitely use most of them in my book, they represent a compositional and personal dream of mine, hard to tell why, but I like them. I may have a chance to add some of them in the last two days, i.e. on Tuesday and Wednesday. I began on Monday, May 4, thus Wednesday, June 3 is the end of my 31 days fuzzy month.
A fairly large group are bicycles, some motorcycles and scooters (for instance the Image of the Day), a traffic jam, a tramway and a railway station. What’s that? Is that a dream? Transport? I am not fully convinced, I may or may not use them. If at all, I’d need some more cars.
There is a small group of non-height-related architecture, but most of these images have some dream-like aspect, thus they are usable.
And then there is the fairly large group of odd things, mannequins on the street, toys, today’s monkey, many others. Dealing with them is easy. They are so much stripped of context, they can as well go for dreams.
Here we are. I’d believe I am on fairly safe ground. It should be possible to make a book with 35 images of that material, and it may even be possible to put some cohesion and logic into it 🙂
The Song of the Day is “Red Is The Color” from the 2007 Steve Earle album “Washington Square Serenade”, one of the albums that I bought following Bill’s recommendation. I didn’t find a video, but Deezer has the album.