Sunday, May 19, 2024

Brilliant battered steel

Hard life
London, ON
May 2024
This photo originally shared on Instagram


The scene: a crowded grocery store. More precisely, the granola bar and cereal aisle.

Hordes of catatonic-looking shoppers are shuffling slowly in all directions, barely paying attention to each other. It is as depressing as it sounds.

Suddenly a flash of colour invades my peripheral vision. I stop the cart and turn to see a support beam between me and a collapsed display of no-name-brand Frosted Flakes cereal.

In a well designed store, the support beam wouldn’t have been placed smack in the middle of an aisle. But this isn’t a well designed store.

It’s wrapped in a textured kind of steel that reflects the drab shelving around it, and in doing so manages to add a certain sense of drama to this undeserving, badly lit aisle.

In fact, look closely enough at it and it seems almost breathtaking. It’s been battered by years of wayward shopping carts, yet it still manages to play with the light.

I guess you just have to be here.

Which is entirely the point. Because if hidden beauty can tap me on the shoulder in this most unlikely place, how many other hidden moments lurk in similarly unlikely places?

And are we stopping for a closer look when they, too, tap us on the shoulder?

I hope so.

#ldnont #london #ontario #canada #walmart #grocery #store #steel #abstract #reflective #mirror #stilllife #shopping #retail #apple #iphone #shotoniphone #photography

Related:
Escape, April 2008

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