Here’s to a spin at editing photos creatively, I guess? This one was inspired by a rather controversial book I read once. I’ve read a great deal of philosophy in my relatively short time alive, some of it taken to heart and some of it perused for whatever various nuggets of wisdom it may offer. There’s wisdom everywhere, you know. Some of the best advice I’ve ever been given is from kid’s shows, honestly. Philosophies that way are like spices, add a little here and there into the bubbling soup of your life, and suddenly you’ve a somewhat cohesive worldview. Just hope it tastes good, I guess.
One of the more eclectic spices, being polite, would be the philosophy of Ayn Rand. There are pitfalls and dangers aplenty in reading Rand (raw unbridled self-interest is so obviously the key to a functioning society) but in this instance a quote stuck out to me and inspired the editing of the photo above, which I’ve called “The Badge of Man.”
The quote is from her most well-known book, “Atlas Shrugged”:
“A circle, she thought, is the movement proper to physical nature, they say that there's nothing but circular motion in the inanimate universe around us, but the straight line is the badge of man, the straight line of a geometrical abstraction that makes roads, rails and bridges, the straight line that cuts the curving aimlessness of nature by a purposeful motion from a start to an end.”
Looking around and taking pictures as often as I can these days I can’t help but be struck by the nature (pun!) of straight lines, vanishing points, horizon lines, and how many of them are natural and how many of them are man-made. This photo was meant to capitalize on that sensation of noticing what Rand so lovingly called the Badge of Man, and therefore takes it name from the phrase as well.
Inspiration man, just let it hit you!