These forgotten shreds of plastic helped a photographer mourn his mom

Simple, beautiful and emotional. There are still great ideas and photographs out there just waiting to be made. 😊  Pelle

© Wes Bell, and the article was found in The Washington Post.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-sight/wp/2017/03/13/these-forgotten-shreds-of-plastic-helped-a-photographer-mourn-his-mom/

Wes Bell’s series “Snag,” inspired by the death of his mother, takes a beautiful and simple idea and infuses an ordinary scene with great emotional power. There is beauty, loss and poetry in every frame. After 20 years in New York working as an international fashion photographer, Bell returned to his birthplace and to fine-art photography in Alberta, Canada.

In describing this work, Bell said: “Three years ago, I was leaving for the airport after saying goodbye to my mother. She was dying of cancer. On the long drive across the Alberta prairie, I found myself distracted by flapping remnants of plastic bags, caught in barbed-wire fences that lined the ditches. Whipped violently by the wind, they were left shredded and lacerated, but trapped nonetheless in the no man’s land of boundary fences, neither here nor there. Thinking about mortality, pain and death in the context of my mother’s terminal illness, these forgotten shreds of plastic took on a deeper significance — Snag.”

Loss and remembrance are universal, and Bell makes feeling those emotions accessible and visible.

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