Statement

What is considered beautiful is often imperfect or impermanent. Discarded, in disrepair and neglected objects suggest the transience of all things and the passage of time, but all embody a distinctive beauty.

The Japanese have an expression for this concept. They call it wabi sabi. In Andrew Juniper’s wabi sabi: the japanese art of impermanence, the author writes, “The term wabi sabi suggests such qualities as impermanence, humility, asymmetry, and imperfection… It offers an aesthetic ideal that uses the uncompromising touch of mortality to focus the mind on the exquisite transient beauty to be found in all things impermanent.”

In Nearly Perfect, many of the images were photographed in salvage yards, locations where the subjects hold their own memories—their own individual pasts. Objects, some broken and all abandoned, become ambiguous and evocative, and some combine with elements of Nature that engulf them—like growing vines or fallen leaves. Everything is impacted by the passage of time, and the influence of Nature and wabi sabi is immanent.