Like many photographers I love shooting 'old things': ancient Anasazi ruins in the Four Corners, falling down mills in the Ozarks or an old truck rusting in someone's barn. So when my photographer friend Larry told me about an old passenger railroad car decaying outside a nearby town, I was intrigued.
'Wabi Sabi' is a Japanese aesthetic that values the 'imperfect, impermanent and incomplete.'
I guess I never realized I was a 'wabi sabi' photographer until I thought about why I spent an hour taking pictures of this old railroad car. It had reached a sort of photographic balancing point between integrity and decay. The windows were cracked, the roof was rusting through to let in sunlight and rain, and the seats were covered in dust and cobwebs. In other words, it was perfectly imperfect.
But doesn't that same aesthetic apply to a lot of outdoor photography? Not just for old trucks, barns and ruins, but for most all landscape photography. An image that is too perfect, too centered and too clean is boring. When I started taking pictures decades ago, I found that my pictures were robust but unsatisfying....they had the antiseptic look of postcards. A good image needs to be just a little 'imperfect, impermanent and incomplete'.
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