Beautiful Lies

When you watch a documentary, be it about nature or some exotic place, where you never have been, it is always a good idea to try to watch around the corners. What may be just outside the picture? Why did the cameraman cut at that place?

In general, the more beautiful the photography, the less trustworthy the content. If a photographer is able to evoke extraordinarily amazingly pretty pictures, that means that he is very skilled in doing that. And that also means he is very skilled in avoiding the ordinary and ugly, which is the most representative of any place in the world.

Take any famous and beautiful city, Rome, Heidelberg, Nice, Kyoto (京都), Macao (澳門, aò mén, ou mùn), Boston, Timbuktu, Cape Town, Buenos Aires, San Francisco... They all have nice parts, but the most representative picture of any of them is one of utmost normality.