Broken Strings
Writing prompts from street photography
I don’t often think too hard about what I’m doing when I take photos of things in the street. It’s often an instinctive thing, I see something I think works or I notice something but something about it doesn’t, like objects that are partially buried in rubbish.
When I saw this broken tennis racket I walked past it several times, and each time I thought ‘that’s not what I’m looking for’. But I began to feel more and more intrigued as I noticed the racket had moved each time I saw it.
The first time I saw it, it was in a dark corner under an overhanging building where I would not have been able to get a good shot. But slowly it seemed it inch more and more out onto the pavement as if creeping into the light, maybe wanting to be seen.
When I finally decided to stop and take a photo, it had managed to move several hundred meters down the street, and was almost in the middle of the pavement, right in my path. I felt as if it was asking me to take the photo, so I did stop and get out my phone.
The way the strings curve and wind against each other, and the way the frame, although broken, still sits in almost its original form is both beautiful and sad to me as if the shape of it tries to suggest better days that are now past.
