THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER
Lots of people think that Italian is the most beautiful language - an idea which seems to stem from how that particular tongue is the idiom of opera, and therefore high culture - but I’ve always found it a rather unpleasant sounding language in the wild - all those harsh vowels - it’s the language of argument rather than the language of love! Personally I find French to be much easier on the ear.
Just in the same way that people have become convinved that Italian is beautiful , when it really isn’t, there is the other widely-held view that German is ugly, stemming from wartime propaganda and a steady diet of Nazis barking orders in movies. Again, I disagree. I’m very fond of the old Deutsch, and many local varieties of it are smooth and pleasing to the ear.
It’s all subjective and it’s best avoiding these kind of stereotypes.
The same phenomena occurs when talking of countries, too. On various online platforms you find a widely-held belief that Japan is a beautiful country, a notion frequently espoused by the citizens of said nation. I beg to differ. Of course it has some wonderful sights - the slick urban architecture of central Tokyo, the cultural treasures of Kyoto, the Japan Alps, Mt Fuji and so on. But the rest of Japan away from the big city centres is a mess of crumbling infrastructure, slum-like decrepit housing, bunches of ugly overhead cables festooned everywhere and a liberal coating of concrete on anything that can take it. Italy, you win hands down in this contest (but wear earplugs so you don’t have to listen to that grating tongue - LOL).
Okay, so again it’s all very subjective and there is a propensity to get sucked into each nation’s self-aggrandising and get fooled by the skewed vignettes we see on the internet.
However, my main point is that you can find beauty even in the most unlikely of places. I’m quite a fan of photographing industrial decay, a milieu that can actually provide gorgeous textures, colours and shapes for those who have an eye to see them.
In this vein I give you this snap taken on my daily walk today. Yes, it’s an electricity substation and a wire fence, but given the right angles and the right camera filter, it has a stark beauty all of its own, don’t you think?