This photograph was taken as a commentary on the ageing process and is intended to show man-made structures and objects in general, as metaphors for man himself.
Our eye is immediately drawn to the bright red bricks in the centre of the photo which have been uncovered by the decaying and falling away of the outer shell that coats the rest of the lower portion of the building. The exposed masonry reveals itself as a flesh wound on an otherwise weathered and brittle skin that can no longer sustain the effort required to successfully combat the effects of ageing.
This raw and garish red colour is mirrored by the brazen hues of the bag that the first woman carries by clutching onto it so tightly. And by stark comparison, her hair is beginning to fade and become lost in the tones of the grey crumbling wall behind. Youth has gone and taken most of the vibrancy of life with it.
The daring bag reveals as much as the bricks who have been forced to bare the very heart of their inner frailties to the rest of the world, while the woman wears hers not on her sleeve, but her shoulder.
‘We are all dying, and there is nothing any of us can do’.
A lone earthworm makes its way across the cold, hard concrete floor of a modern train station somewhere. An earthworm. On concrete. He fails to see the irony, and in fact he sees nothing at all, especially oblivious to the shiny black trail he leaves glistening in his wake.
It has been raining outside on this particular autumn evening, and in a bid for freedom our worm has wandered through a small puddle. The smooth, thin line connecting him to his past creates a temporary map on a slightly less temporary surface, and serves as a reminder of what he was running from in the first place.
He pauses momentarily to have his picture taken, strikes a pose and then leaves, continuing in the direction he was always destined to follow. This brief encounter was overshadowed by a deep and heavy sorrow that marked both the acknowledgement of, and helplessness to affect significant change in the plight of other earthlings, for unbeknownst to him, this lonely worm was headed as straight as possible for the edge of platform one, where certain death awaited him.
When later I asked him why, as I stared frantically into the darkness of the tracks below, with a defeated look and limp disposition he quietly replied ‘evolution made me do it’.
One day I decided that I would no longer recoil from the natural tragedies and horrors of the world as Gaia intended it, and instead I was to accept the happenings of the true and wildest wildlife documentary that unfolded before me every day.
I became a cruel god. I watched as many others died before me, piercing into my unresponsive brain with their longing and watery eyes in desperate attempts to illicit salvation of any kind. But I remained mountainous and silent, an omnipotent presence that had no reason to prove his existence to anyone.
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