A Beautiful Emptiness
“We are hypnotized by solitude, by the gaze of the solitary house.” Gaston Bachelard, “The Poetics of Space” (1958)
The abandoned building and its vacant gaze. A “beautiful emptiness” in the photographer’s eye (Kuhns). The poignant beauty of a place that once held a space for the small routines and daily rituals that give shape to our lives, for our most private moments and the moments we share with others. Because we want to believe that, after we’re gone, something of those lived experiences remains, faint echoes that mark our presence — I was here and that can’t be erased, how could it be? I walked through its spaces, navigating corners, moving in and out of rooms, touching walls, breathing the air and filling it with sounds, noises, voices and gestures. The place is empty now, a flat surface whose almost perfect symmetry speaks of anonymity and uniformity, but it is an emptiness filled with the reverberations of my being.
That is what I want to believe.
Connie Kuhns is an essayist, photographer and music journalist living and working on the West Coast of Canada. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including Geist Magazine http://www.geist.com/kuhns-connie/. I took the photograph and the title of my short piece, with her permission, from Kuhn’s Instagram account @conniekuhns
