Living in an urban environment calls for compromise, and acceptance of imperfection. Trading off a perfect, cookie-cutter suburban lifestyle for a city life less perfect means that more times than often, you’re working to beat the odds. You overcome pollution. You overcome high rents and living costs; your savings account is usually drier than our damns. You put up with the power outages; you put up with putting up for no reason; the list is endless. It’s in your blood as a city dweller: you are resilient- and you will overcome.
Similarly, I put up with not having a digital camera. I put up with not having a scanner. All of my pictures were shot on a 35mm film camera handed down to me, scanned on university scanners, digitally manipulated on a computer and printed out on plain card. Photography purists will writhe in pain because my work is neither film nor digital. It is a hybrid approach of beating the odds, keeping it cheap yet wholesome: the description of your daily life as a city dweller. You are urbane in the most unassuming of ways.
I guess Los Angeles and Lahore have more in common than people think: they’re both cities that people love to hate yet can’t live without. They’re crowded, they’re rich and poor at the same time, and they’re ugly and beautiful at the same time.
Most of all, they are resilient. They are hopeful.
March 24, 2008 at 6:05 am |
Your write really well. I just read bits of your college papers and liked them very much especially the one on elitism..
cheers
Raza