No no no, this is not a series about prostitutes ( although you never know what the future might bring, the step from flowers to the proverbial butterflies of the night may well end up falling exactly within the scope of this series).
When started using a camera more and more and it developed into a hobby, it struck my how it brought about such a different perspective on everyday things and the world around me. I started seeing things I would normally not have noticed or would not have left a lasting impression. I remember well how, just before I was about to head back for the Netherlands, we came back from Hamner. I was quiet and sort of mentally preparing to leave all this beautiful scenery behind and than I looked back one more time, to see this:
I asked my wife to stop the car immediately and so we did I walked back as quickly as I could to get this moment captured. And there on the edge of a cliff, dangerously close to the road and passing traffic it was as if God him- or herself was trying to tell me something; this light coming through the clouds ( symbolic in various senses), the heavens opening up to poor some divine light over the scene I was capturing. This has been an image I could not get rid of all, the time I was in the Netherlands. Long story short, in three weeks I was back to stay and to this day I think that the image above had something to do with it.
This new series: Curbside Beauty is all about little things that sort of make an otherwise ordinary thing like a curbside into something special. So far it seems that flowers especially seem to have this ability and power to transform their environment. Humans are considered special because of their ability to adapt to all these different circumstances but most of all because they can change their natural environment to their requirements. While that is true, we humans do not always seem to manage to do this in the most aesthetic way. That it seems is where flowers come in, nature’s way of restoring the aesthetics where we humans failed to preserve it.
Just what to think of this little blue flower, alone at the edge of a parking lot. It’s easy to park your car over but really it was amazing how it transformed an otherwise dull strip of grass at the end of the parking lot.
There is already something about blue flowers but this certainly was one small, actually tiny flower with a lot to offer taking into consideration its environment.
Or what to think of this mini-violet, making a strip of concrete slabs to serve as a driveway all of a sudden look so much better.
Here we are, a line of concrete slabs, dull, grey and with dirt, sand and earth in between them where they have started to shift over time.
And here is this little violet that seems to think:
It’s easy in a nice well kept garden, but this grey area needs a little color, and since nothing else seems to be doing it, I will have to do it by myself.
Well I think this little violet did a great job if you are willing to see it.
And then there was the yellow high dandy lion or something like it. Here was a patch of grass, kept short and meant for nothing more that to separate footpath from road. A place you use to park your garbage containers
On it’s fifty centimeter high thin stalk this otherwise simple dandy lion dominated and transformed the impression of this strip of grass along the road completely all by itself. Who would dare to put his garbage container on top of that and not feel guilty. A beautiful pest.
But I was most impressed by this bunch of incredible gerberas transforming a similar patch of grass. In fact they attracted so much attention that it could have ended in accidents I have seen people that literally hit the breaks to check out this incredible and isolated bunch of attention seekers.
I got so caught up lying in the gutter for a different perspective that a car almost ran over me: dangerously beautiful.
There are more images in this new series that can be found here >>>, or you could of course have a browse around in my complete photostream on Flickr here >>> where there are over 600 more photos. All favorites for some reason or another. And if you see something you like do leave me a comment.
Martin Luther, the initiator of the Protestant Reformation once wrote:
God writes the gospel not in the Bible alone, but also on trees and in the flowers and clouds and starts
Looking at these curbside beauties does this make sense all of a sudden? Bringing beauty and joy to otherwise overlooked, at times desolated and neglected places. Who does that remind you of?
The Desk of the Renaissance Man 