Last week, I stopped in front of a place I must have passed a hundred times before in my neighborhood. In front of me was a closed fence leading to the backyard of a building, and inside it, a smokestack that I assume belong to a heating furnace of some sort.

Two thoughts collided in my head at the same moment. The first is how I had passed this place so many times before without noticing this tall smokestack; the other is that I had to take a picture to convey what I saw in my mind.

This is not the kind of picture you put on Instagram because Instagram is a social place for the masses, and the masses expect pictures of smiling babies and cute cats. Who wants to open their Instagram and see… this?

a black and white photo of smokestack behind barbed wire

The fact remained that I took this picture to express an idea, and as a photographer and a person, that’s the point. The why might be more elusive, depending on who you are and what goes on inside your head at the moment (I am reading Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor E Frankl 📚 right now). Not every photo is meant to bring smiles, even if “the people of Instagram” (who are just an idea I have in my head as guilt) say otherwise.

Who was I, though, when I took that photo? Not the same person who passed this building 99 times previously, if to judge from the fact that I didn’t even realize this structure existed. At that time, I was a descendant of holocaust survivors and a Jew. Tomorrow… who knows? But a part of me will always be in this picture. After all, it’s just a smokestack, and it’s just a fence; It’s me who made it into something else and then into this picture.