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Colorado Tourism Promotional Postcard


The San Juan Mountains still have plenty of tourists here for the fall color season. I wonder if this is what they had in mind.

Wasn't it Arthur Koestler's Act of Creation that discussed the usefulness of inversion in creativity? Maybe he was on to something. For instance, every windshield tourist is running around the mountains trying to take "breathtakingly beautiful" postcards of autumn colors. Since digital cameras are so good, most of these postcards look pretty much the same, and the world's supply of pixels is depleted for nothing. A yellow leaf is just a yellow leaf.


What if, instead of joining the leaf-peeping hordes, we asked, "What is the ugliest thing we could photograph at this time of year?" Or is that negative thinking? Well at least it is thinking, and a difficult type of thinking it truly is.


For instance I thought wet, disgusting snow coming down in early October might be a suitably perverse subject. But being anti-beautiful is just as difficult as the other side of the coin; perhaps more so, since we can't just imitate somebody else.

The biggest snowflakes fall just above freezing and then instantly melt. It is necessary to find a dark background for them to show up. I tried to play around in "shutter time" control mode on my camera, which is a mode I seldom use, and am not good at.

In fact, the question of "what should I choose to deliberately come up with ugliness" causes the brain to freeze up, even for an ol' cynic and curmudgeon. You can't just take your notions of beauty and multiply them by an algebraically-simple negative one, although there's probably some aesthetician or metaphysician who would argue that you could.

It still seems as though something good might eventually come from this project. Let us try to keep an open mind; after all, ugliness is in the eye of the beholder.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Ugh! October snow! That's one reason elevation plays an extremely important role in our Fall travels................................
I'm glad my efforts weren't wasted, bigskymo, and that somebody found my photos sufficiently ugly. (grin)

Elevation always matters, but it seems as though latitude matters more on the shoulder seasons than in mid-summer or mid-winter. So I'm pushing the envelope by being here, and now I'm hitching up and moving NORTH!