40. May 2008: Otto Kitchens

I photograph because I have a passion for it. It's that simple. I have struggled in the past to find the right words to describe what drives much of my art. And then I read an article on the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi: finding magic in the ordinary...in the flawed. As Leonard Loren said: "Wabi-sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. It is a beauty of things unconventional." Wabi-sabi is what I seek when I explore an abandoned factory or walk the streets of a city or find a deserted house in a field. "Wabi-sabi is an intuitive appreciation of a transient beauty in the physical world that reflects the irreversible flow of life in the spiritual world. It is an understated beauty that exists in the modest, rustic, imperfect, or even decayed, an aesthetic sensibility that finds a melancholic beauty in the impermanence of all things." Wabi-Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence, by Andrew Juniper. I find it fascinating to explore the things that we leave behind as we close or abandon a building. The images in this gallery are from a stamp and seal factory location that the company left to move to another site. As you can see, in places it seems as if they just stopped mid-work and walked out. Someone asked recently why I didn't take more portraits. I thought about it and replied that, in a way, I did, but more like the echoes of people in these sites. I have a respect for these quiet places and hope that it comes through in my art. [url=http://www.ottokphotography.com]Otto's website[/url]