When you walk on the street, say in a big, busy city, you see a lot of people. The majority is probably unknown to you so you just go on minding your own business, which is fine. But as our humanifesto says you can enhance the quality of your life by being just tiny winy bit more compassionate towards others. So throw in a smile here and there or even a nod, because we’re all in this together – to speak with Ben Lee language – we’re all human and all living at on the same planet (except for the casual astronaut).
This is the message of this weeks work of art. The Ben Lee lyrics: “on the subway we feel like strangers” of the previously mentioned song still is applicable here, only subway is replaced by street. I am going to talk about Babeltales a twenty-nine part long photographic journey by the gifted Danish photographer Peter Funch.
Despite the fact that Babeltales consists for 99,999% out of images the meaning is still very clear and present. The setting is a big city, my bet is on New York, and the persons featuring in the photographs have one or more things very clearly in common. Furthermore everyone is just really minding his or her own business and not interacting with the others a lot.
Lets start with the photograph above, it’s named Enforcing Enforcers, original here, and for starters it depicts at least four law enforcers (with the caps). They seem to be pretty isolated from the rest of the world. Also there is the (quiet stereotypical) FBI-guy standing in the centre of all attention. Almost all the people in the photograph serve the same goal but still they seem so separated from one another.
An even more powerful picture is Memory Lane. It shows a big group of tourists with various cultural backgrounds standing in the middle of Times Square taking snaps of the popular hot-spot. These people come from all corners of the Earth to see a place, to photograph it, to enjoy it, to love it! Though they aren’t related in any way, and they will probably never be so.
The message of this project isn’t that we should start talking to one another if we happen to share the color of our t-shirts. I think Funch rather tries to show how unaware we are of the things we have in common with our surroundings. We may have very different personalities, very different cultural backgrounds and very different ancestors, but at the end of the day we’re all/only human.
Besides the original message Funch tries to convey his photographs are really good too. Occasionally you may think that it was composed, that the people were arranged in a certain way. I doubt it, everything appears so spontaneous and so natural, that if it were composed, Funch would be the best photographer in the world.
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