Nothing is really safe from fashion. Clothes, cars, colors, foods, travel destinations, literary styles, music, cinema, beauty routines and expressions, physical activities, personality types, antidepressants, emotional structures, leisure, journalism, and so on. I spend, in fact, the entirety of what is monetizable or whose possession or practice can result in an improvement in our social status.
That leaves very little in the margins, narrow wild and uncultivable strips where everything resists commercialism and style.
Even nature does not escape fashion. You only need to look at certain Instagram accounts or browse through some specialized publications to see that trees and birds are undeniably popular, vegetables too, provided they are very earthy, and flowers, but only if they look very wild.
The humble, too, seems to have its moment of glory. I come across him more and more often where we once found only majestic canyons and glorious savannah, between the glossy pages of magazines better known for their photos of big cats and glaciers. These are the heroes of our childhood disgusts: moss, mycelia, snails and centipedes, little people of shadow and humus on whom the spotlight suddenly shines, thereby revealing their existence of secret communions and silent sliding.
In bookstores, books devoted to humble local plants, once described as weeds, encourage clutter and disorder in gardens cultivating the appearance of neglect. They sing to us of the virtues of amaranth and sagittarius, the splendors of what grows at ground level, in the proud shadow of better-known plants. The dandelion growing in a crack in the middle of a cement sidewalk has never been so hot.
I sound cynical, but it’s a trend that delights me and seems full of meaning – it’s a very beautiful thing to dream of the steppes of Patagonia and the geysers of Iceland, but isn’t that not otherwise conducive to loving the earth on which we walk, and the small organisms that make it what it is?
Earlier this year, the venerable magazine National Geographic published, between a photo report on the baby seals off the coast of the “Magdalen Islands” and another on the Gunung Palung National Park (scarlet monkey, giant argus in full courtship display, sumptuous image of the mists descending from Mount Palung), a short article on vernal ponds.
It’s difficult to be more humble than these small ephemeral pools which form in the hollows of the woods in spring, when the snow melts. They are not connected to the hydrographic network, they are closed environments, more or less large, into which no watercourse flows. They generally dry out during the summer, only to fill with snow in winter which will become a pond. They are full of life.
I know some of them, they are the “swomps” from our childhood games, which we always carefully avoided, the memory of the scene of the leeches from Stand by Me well in mind. Nothing very sexy or even interesting, it seemed to us, we were far from the waterfall or even the stream, the idea prevailed that the ponds were dirty and unhealthy places, where only life was bustling negligible than slimy.
I don’t think I’m stealing any punch by announcing that the article proves that we were wrong (except when it comes to goo, which indeed abounds). This is not a great revelation, we are no longer 11 years old or have scabies on our knees, we know that even the smallest lives are part of an immense and precious whole, but here they are presented to us as true splendors.
This is not an exaggeration, technological advances make it possible to take photographs that would never have been possible not so long ago, a phenomenon which is undoubtedly not unrelated to the new popularity of these small organisms. One nourishes the other, the possibility of making beautiful images encouraging enthusiasm for the humble and the small, which gains interest because it is magnified by skillful craftsmen.
That’s what’s pernicious, with fashions, what comes first? I don’t really know anymore if it was the trend that revealed in me a hidden passion for amphibians or if the love of spotted salamanders came to me like that, from seeing them floating between two waters, in a radius of filtered light. But my easily influenced eye, which turns more and more towards the ground and the tufts of weeds, sees that there are some trends that are more promising than others.
What do you think ? Participate in the dialogue
reference: www.lapresse.ca