Mesmerizing, eerie photo of Washington for this article. By Stefani Reynolds, who doesn't seem to be on Twitter--probably a good decision--but if someone knows her, tell her I thought this photo was a true work of art. nytimes.com/2021/01/16/us/…
I can't stop looking at it: the composition, the color, the beauty and the sense of menace. Tells a whole story without a single human face. I wonder how much of that was accidental and how much of it Reynolds' genius? I always wonder about that, with photography--
even though it's clear that some photographers have many more happy accidents than others, and thus that photographs like this aren't an accident.
You've got the buildings whose banal, bureaucratic ugliness tell the story of why people hate D.C. so much they'd burn it down. The (literally) pedestrian traffic lights causing reflections in the water--captured in a way Monet himself would envy.
The lighting, the colors ... it's a work of art.
It reminds me too of the mystery of D.C.--why was the seat of the most powerful empire since the Roman era so ugly? The Americans had no use for beauty in their imperial architecture. None. Why not?
Perhaps it has something to do with our Puritan heritage.
Or perhaps it has something to do with our once-absolute confidence in our power. If you have that much security in your power, you perhaps have no need at all to demonstrate your power through your architecture. I still find it strange.
The ugliness is of the city is so stark, though, that I found living there unbearable. You would think, given the concentration of wealth and power in DC, that it would affect everyone the same way and thus that they'd (long since) have done something about it.
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