“The camera never lies”
How many times have you heard this little sentence, looking at a holiday snap maybe, or a group gathering photo and not wanting to believe that you’ve put on those few extra pounds or gained the extra grey hairs or wrinkles.
A comment from Meanderer on yesterday’s post “Behind the books” made me think, she said that I “always choose such pretty places to visit” and my thoughts ran along the lines that although my pictures don’t tell lies about the places I visit, they do omit some of the truth. I need the happy thoughts and so my camera is drawn to the prettiness whenever I see it, I don’t need to remember the litter on the pavement, or the dead bird by the side of the road, the wood-pigeon nesting in the branches of the tree outside is a much happier thing to remember when my memory fails me and I fall back on my photos looking for the happy thoughts.
For instance the picture above has omitted to show that we got lost in the outer city of Lille and found ourselves wandering through an estate of high-rise flats, it doesn’t show that Hubby ushered me on with my camera as a police car stopped next to the two hooded youths we had just passed, nor does it show the police van standing by ready to give assistance if needed.
What it does show is the huge metal, windowless, structure glowing like tinfoil as the sun peeked out from behind a cloud and twinkled on the corner of it to make me smile.
This picture showing the two pairs of shoes almost silhouetted against the sky, their colours mirroring the two buildings with the grey and tan coloured windows and balconies doesn’t show the bars on the windows at ground level, and the metal rolling shutters which come down over the shop fronts at night, nor the over-flowing wheelie bin on the side of the road.
Hubby is more warily world-wize than me, and so he tells me that the shoes which I found entertaining, and quite happily stopped to point the camera at, are possibly boundary markers in a gang culture, a warning from one gang to any other to stay off their territory.
However, looking for the bright side, because there always has to be one, no matter how small, the very fact that these two pictures have survived the cutting room floor of my memories and made it here onto the blog is good. I still need the prettiness, and the smiles to look back on, but with the aid of my camera I’m starting to look deeper to find the prettiness, and not to just dismiss the smile as not being there at all.
Like to see more of the prettiness in”Lille” ?
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