Sometimes as a photographer, you are blessed with perfect lighting. Art then merely follows.
In rare unplanned and spur of the moments, when the lighting is perfect, even though you did not even plan for it to be, you grab the opportunity and run with it.
Recently, when I visited a café with my girlfriend, we were blessed with the perfect lighting. As a photographer, I yearn for these moments. Every artist is different, and every camera and lens will yield different results. But at that moment, when my girlfriend asked me to photograph her drink, I saw with the first photograph I took that the lighting was perfect.
And then the chairs started to walk into the café, ordering wine and food. It was so interesting, as I pointed my camera at something other than the chairs, the chair caught my eye in the viewfinder. The symmetry of the photograph was perfect, even though it was totally unplanned. It just happened, as if the gods pointed my gaze in the right direction.
I then saw all the other chairs in the café. With the one chair leading to the other. We were alone in the café, except for the staff. They were fine with me taking photographs. (Some places do not like it, and others even charge you money for it.)
So, please join me on this rather interesting photographic journey of mostly chairs, some wine, and some interior photographs of a special place we visited (twice in one day!).
A Chair Walks into a Café and Orders a Glass of Wine
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Between Moments of Art and Utter Madness
The perfect symmetry screams art. But it also demands a strange type of madness to appreciate it. It screams in a different tonality, deeper, and more of a hum. A humming scream. The world resonates with this hum. If you carefully listen, if you tune yourself in, you will hear the low-deep-hum continually and perpetually screaming alongside the perfect symmetry.
The chair and all of its directional lines scream this art, this madness. It vibrates with a strange frequency, something that drives you mad, but at the same time demands you to appreciate its splendour. No wonder poets say that they are rarely the creators of their art; the world presses upon them the words. The poet is merely a blank canvas receiving anything and everything the world demands them to write down.
This is a violent act; the screaming world does not allow every single ear to hear it. Those who can hear it — the mad — know all too well the violence of the words that the world shouts. She has no sympathy for those who can hear, those who are allowed, those who are blessed-cursed.
But the violence of utter madness, and the beauty of chaotic art, can be a thing of beauty. The absence of humans in the photographs (except the two or three), gives the chairs a strange solitary and absurd feeling. At once, we see the chair, but without people sitting in them, we also entertain this strange feeling of unhomeliness. The chair does not become the chair as it was intended. It becomes an object of contemplation. And in the contemplating mode, the world becomes utterly perplexing; a new world opens in front of us. The strangeness soon dissipates but the normality does not return.
The objects are injected into a new world, something wholly different. A new world opens up, revealed, divulged, ripped open... It is a violent moment, one akin to birth. And in this moment, between art and utter madness, strange beauty can be found.
Postscriptum, or An Artsy Moment
I did not plan to photograph the little café on the corner of the road. It just happened. The lighting was perfect. In these rare moments, I lose myself and I try to capture the moment in its poetic beauty.
I hope that you enjoyed this photographic journey with some wild chairs and some wine.
All of the writing in this post is my own, albeit inspired by the perfect lighting in this little corner café. The photographs are also my own, taken with my Nikon D300 and Nikkor 50mm lens.