essays
The Street Around the Corner
tripping over nothing in everyday streets
These streets are nothing but normal. Just that, and not this and that. Take them or leave them. Completely self-sufficient and ambitionless, there is something about these streets or in these streets, but I don’t know what it is and I am firmly set on not investigating it. But maybe they will speak to you the way they speak to me – volumes – with that soft-spoken, nondiscriminatory voice of the mundane. You couldn’t find them if you wanted to, but these are the streets around the corner.
"This isn’t about finding anything. Nor is it about the ordinary shedding its skin. This is about the skin itself and its elasticity."
This is not about finding subtleties, beauties, coincidences, or accidents in these streets to make them bigger or their narratives more important, immoderate and noteworthy. This isn’t about finding anything. Nor is it about the ordinary shedding its skin. This is about the skin itself and its elasticity. And it isn’t about normalcy opening its plain chest to flash bodacious tattoos on its heart. This is about how that heart beats against the chest from the inside with an unassuming steadiness.
When I think “street” (not street the photographic genre, but the very word between the quotation marks), I think of these streets. They look what their word sounds like. Not in the obvious way of onomatopoeias like “moo” or “beep,” but in a hidden sense, the way “bread” the thing bears an uncanny resemblance to its word. Perhaps, such a resemblance is born in reverse, not because anyone crafted these words so aptly, but because their common everyday usage created the association. Ultimately, this kind of resemblance eludes explanations the same way these streets and their essence can’t be cornered.
"I strip their description down to only one statement and this is final: these are streets."
Not imposing any art on them or desperately extrapolating some moxie that isn’t there, I strip their description down to only one statement and this is final: these are streets.
