http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/10/06/magazine/look-east-river-flotsam.html

 

 

I chose the first photo of the essay, “the peculiar beauty of flotsam,” the rainbow of used lighters.  The first thing to come to my mind was our “throw-away culture,” especially (I would think) in New York City.  I think the vast majority of us recycle as much as we can, but this photo shows that not everything makes it to the recycling center or even to the dump.  The fact that all of these items in the essay were found in a single day is rather alarming.

Jens Mortensen, the photographer, uses a few of the techniques that we read about in “10 top photography composition rules;”  leading lines- the lighters are arranged by color and are lined up in 3 rows; the eye naturally and quickly scans through all 3 rows in order, top to bottom.  Symmetry & pattern – being mostly of the same brand and style, there is a pattern in the 3 rows of lighters, all the same but each an individual, of different color and various amounts of wear, tear and damage.  Background – all of the photos in this essay are shot on a bright white background. In the case of the lighters, the bright background helps make the colors vibrant and you can tell that some of the lighters are translucent.

This photo grabbed my attention because of the vibrant colors and, upon a closer look, each lighter was an individual.  Each one was purchased by someone, used to light various things (smokes, drugs, bbqs, pilot lights, etc), carried around like a wad of cash, then ultimately it runs out of gas and is tossed.  I thought about how the lighters were sorted and arranged by color which made me think of light coming through a prism, how it splits the “white light” (like the background) into the color spectrum (like the array of lighters).  I thought about the lighters being new and shiny and how a single, small flame could become a big flame and say, burn down an apartment building or how a cigarette butt could do the same…make something shiny and new into something burnt, dirty, damaged.  I thought about people, like us students, being “stamped out” like these lighters, at one point, fresh off the factory belt, only to be used and abused, scarred, burned…then thrown out when empty, replaced next semester.  I found it interesting that there was only one white lighter and only one black lighter and that there were so many more colors represented and thought about how people are “white” or “black” but we are really those lighters in between…brown, olive, tan, pale, red, dark, light…