Lena Amuat

I love this photo by Lena Amuat. You can find more here.

How can dirty feet be so beautiful? 

The seemingly weightless flesh so quietly positioned on the stark white background. It is a simple spectacle, but a spectacle nonetheless. This photograph grabs me with instantaneous shock value....oh no! dirty feet on a clean sheet!... I can't take my eyes away. I can't stop looking. I look for a moment longer than I should when I am struck by the interaction between the two feet. The image creates an allegory for a larger, more complex and emotional narrative of human relationship...I won't go so far as to say the two feet represent any concrete or specific narrative, but what I will dare to say, is that the interaction between the two feet is recognizable to the viewer as human emotion.  It is in the thin line created where the two feet meet that the viewer recognizes the energy as distinctly human, which then references that which falls just out of the frame of the photograph. 

Like Christian Patterson's photograph of the gas stove that I posted below, this photograph leads our mind outside of the immediate moment of the photograph itself. In Patterson's photo, the intrigue lies in a potential catastrophe that could happen in an unknowing future. In this photograph, however, the attractive element lies in the past. The mystery is in the events that preceded the moment that is revealed to us in the image. Those feet inevitably belong to a person who sleeps between those clean white sheets. We get just a glimpse or a hint of the ankle, which leads us to wondering what could have led up to this moment in which the owner of these feet was so tired that he or she fell into bed with such dirty feet...and where were these feet that led to them acquiring so much grime?