The Quiet Utility of Things

I remember walking through a back alley in Marseille, looking for a shortcut to the port. The main streets were loud, filled with the smell of diesel and the shouting of vendors, but here, the city seemed to hold its breath. There were three rusted water valves bolted to a crumbling brick wall, forgotten by everyone except the spiders. I stopped for a moment, not because they were beautiful, but because they were so stubbornly present. We spend our lives chasing the grand events, the milestones that define our biographies, yet it is often these silent, functional objects that anchor us to the earth. They do their work without fanfare, day after day, witnessing the passage of time while we are busy worrying about the future. There is a strange, quiet dignity in being useful and remaining unseen. It makes me wonder what else we walk past every day, assuming it has nothing to say to us.

Morris Hilarian has captured this exact feeling of quiet endurance in his image titled Still Three. It finds the same hidden poetry in the mundane corners of Kota Kinabalu that I found in that alleyway. What do you see when you look at the things we usually choose to ignore?