I saw the photograph below in a news magazine that I subscribe to called The Economist. I didn't understand just what it was about it that fascinated me then, but am trying to understand it a little better as I put some words together. For me, writing is in many ways a process of discovering what it is I am trying to write about.
Perhaps what is most beautiful about the picture is that it does not look to me like what it actually is. To me, it resembles more an illustration than photograph, and this interruption of definition helps me to feel a bit freer, although grudgingly so. I question the limiting judgments that I place on the people and world I live in, because I realize that things, like the image, may not be as I seem them to be.
Adding to the akwardness of the photographic representaion here (and I mean that in the liberating sense described above), the buildings and freeways depicted in it seem to rest inexplicably on top of what looks like a lake. The magazine calls the metropolis shown, Lagos, Nigeria, a "sprawling lagoon city", and although there must be some solid engineering there that I really just don't understand, I can't fathom how those structures stay afloat like that.
It seems like they couldn't possibly do that, and in that I find a world of possibilty. It's a kind of science fiction in one of the few ways I can imagine liking that genre.
Definitely swampy
