Monday Moments: I Love This Shot #1

Hello and welcome to a brand new feature for my blog! It’s called – rather unimaginatively – ‘I Love This Shot’ and is a showcase for the images I really love, but haven’t featured on the blog before. They might be real weddings, commercial images, portraits or personal images - old or new. I’ll also explain a little about why I love it and what it means to me. Enjoy!

I have a fascination with grafitti, I really do. Setting aside the moral issue of defacing public property, and the fact that some of it is, let’s face it, just a horrible mess, there are times when I see grafitti and it really speaks to me. Sometimes, it’s a profound message which makes me think about life in a totally different way. Sometimes, it’s just funny. (I remember vividly seeing ’crispy bum’ on a wall in Falmouth, which still makes me smile).

This shot, I love for many different reasons. I love the way that the message has been added to by another visual commentator. I wonder what the reason was? Were they saying that the graffiti artist was an animal because they were defacing property? (in which case, the intentional or (possibly unintentional) irony is just beautiful in itself).

I like to think that the original graffiti artist was making a statement about the natural state of the human race, and I like to think that the secondary narrator was opting out of the innate brutality and violence that being a member of humanity brings. I also love the poignancy of the fact that the message was written next to a barred window.  I also love that the exclamation mark is written with a heart, not a dot (and that’s something I didn’t notice for a long, long time.)

I’m probably wrong on all of my assumptions about why it was written, but I’ll never know for sure. That’s what makes a great picture; one that makes you pause, ponder, think. One that makes you feel that it’s captured something important, no matter how small.