untitled bottle

untitled bottle

At the time I took this, I saw it as nothing more than a joke to send to a friend. After I got home, however, I was surprised by how easy it was to beautify this shot in the edit. It looks like a dreamy, nostalgic product shot with warm, glowing sunlight. There’s real beauty there.

But the reality behind it is so much cruder. At some point, some drunk was out in the middle of the day, going bottle to mouth, and polished off this French liquor before discarding the bottle in the grass. Or maybe it was left there the night before after getting passed around by a crowd of rowdy drunks stumbling down the sidewalk before it was emptied and cast aside without much thought.

And now here it lies, getting walked by, scoffed at, and photographed looking something like an offering, like it was placed there gently.

It is a deer lying in a sunlit meadow waiting for its mom to return.

It is a sacred gift left for our ancestors in the afterlife.

It is an empty bottle of liquor on a wet patch of grass in Broad Ripple, IN.