These images depict random paraphernalia in harbours and other maritime facilities. The whole raison d’être of all the subject matter included in this project is totally functional. The shapes, colours and textures of all these objects, were never chosen for aesthetic reasons. They were designed with a purpose in mind. These places are working environments.

And yet, I could not avoid seeing there a wonderful arrangement of decay, as if laid out by an unknown artist, a piece of found art that encapsulated a strong metaphorical message and a deep philosophical concept.

I remembered the words of Leonard Koren, when discussing about the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi: “the exact opposite of the Western ideal of great beauty as something monumental, spectacular, and enduring… [the beauty of] the minor and the hidden, the tentative and the ephemeral: things so subtle and evanescent they are invisible to vulgar eyes”.

The meaning of these scenes could be said to be created by means of the collaboration of many different actors. The first one is human civilization, that manufactured these objects and constructions in order to serve a functional purpose. The second is chaos, which has led to a random arrangement of the different elements that appear in these images, ever-changing as the hectic activity of the harbour takes place. The third actor is time, that sets everything into a process of devolution towards “nothingness”: peeling paint, rusting metal, rotting wood, crumbling concrete…Finally, the fourth actor is the photographer, who recognises the beauty in the ordinary and provides a new conceptual context in which to interpret what is in front of the camera, providing meaning to randomness.

Do all actors contribute to turning a framed piece of the universe into a meaningful piece of art?

Leonard Koren, when discussing ways of reconciling matter and spirit in the wabi-sabi oriental philosophy, provides an interesting answer: “Two opposing views regarding materiality exist: One narrative holds that objects are made important by inspired acts of artistic invention. The other narrative expresses what we might call a post-material or non-dualistic point of view. In this way of looking at things, all objects have equal intrinsic value. Objects become activated – come alive and reveal their true utility and worth – only when attention is focused on them. When that moment of attention is over, the objects move off the stage of our immediate awareness. They go back to being ordinary.”

From this point of view, the photographer can not only be understood as an “inspired artistic inventor”, but also as a medium that connects us with a character of the universe that transcends its pure materiality, “producing” beauty in the process. The fact of aiming a camera at a certain object or piece of the universe is a way of activating it. By acknowledging it, the photographer triggers a dynamic event from which beauty is the result. A beauty that, Leonard Koren explains, is not an “inherent property of things. It happens when conditioned and habituated ways of looking at things fall away when things are defamiliarized. The beauty of wabi-sabi involves perceiving something extraordinary in something that might otherwise be regarded as quite ordinary”.

Like Irving Penn’s images of cigarette butts on the pavement, these images are the result of a perceptual event that, in the words of Arthur C. Danto, creates a “transfiguration of the commonplace” that turns typical and banal objects into expressive elements of conceptual, emotional and aesthetic value. An event that will, in turn, be prolonged by the observer.