Chicago Bean, File Magazine

Shit.

It would be easy to sit back and laugh at America, to say they’ve made their bed and now they must lie in it, except for the small fact that the rest of us in this world are also uneasy and involuntary bedfellows with that retard and his appetite for destruction. Also, all the American bloggers I read happen to be Democrats (pure coincidence, since all I ever look for in a blog is intelligent and interesting writing, not political affiliation. Go figure) and the genuine anguish I am reading all down my bookmark list makes my heart go out to them.

But enough of ugliness and depression for now. No doubt there will be much more of that to come in the four years ahead. Here are some happy pictures instead:

Chicago was never particularly high on the list of cities I’d like to go to in America some day (let’s make that some day more than four years from now), until I found out about Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate sculpture, also known as the Chicago Bean. And fell completely in love.

FILE Magazine publishes “images that treat subjects in unexpected ways.” I read a lot of online photography zines, and this is the one I keep coming back to. There are so many photographs I love at this site that it would really be pointless to list them all, but here is a shortlist of five:

• Lomo coaster
• Lady in white
• Flowers behind window
• Cover girl
• Three Sisters is a crazily beautiful gallery of photos of three Polish steamships. These are the kinds of photographs I’ve been trying to take for years, taken here by a master.