The Circus is Coming to Town!

  
Logo courtesy of Roncalli 

"The attraction of the virtuoso for the public
 is very like that of the circus for the crowd. 
There is always the hope that something dangerous will happen."

Claude Debussy 

Julius Fucik - "Entry Of The Gladiators"

I haven't been to the circus since I was a kid. I am not sure whether my Dad took me that last time. I know I was with him the first time I saw a circus. Dad always arranged tickets through one of the clubs he where he was a member. That last time he may have organised a group of tickets for friends with kids. My baby sister and I may have gone with them Most of the Dads would go the club and wait it out until the show was finished. Each year he would arrange for us to go to these summer events, while the clubs still offered them.

This was when we lived in Australia. In those days, it was a thrill for kids to go to the circus, as it was a rarity in the cities and the country. A once a year chance, for something “exotic” besides the shows, regattas and rodeos, to found annually in the country towns and the big city. The circuses generally had exotic animals that shouldn’t have been performing in captivity, kept in always sad and sometimes bad conditions. Reflecting on it now, I can only imagine the stress and sadness these animals must have endured, to delight and make us human kids, as well as the human adults, smile, laugh or gawk in awe, at their performances.

"The Gloves are off!" - Round #01: Abandoned

"You are hurt and worn out"

Ayumi Hamasaki 

Goyte and Fourth Floor Collapse - "Worn Out Blues"

"The Gloves are off!", at least in Gersthof, the area of Vienna where I live. Wandering from my apartment to the local transport junction, has taken an intriguing turn in the last few months. Major trackwork, on the tramlines, has been going on and will continue until the end of September.  I touched on the work in a previous essay, titled "Nuts in May".

The photographic opportunities afforded by this work to shoot some intriguing and offbeat photo studies has been overwhelming. I could be writing on a variety of topics and sharing the better photos for months on this trackwork. The photos above, of work gloves caught my attention on different days and in different places.

Worn-out and abandoned, the pair in the first photo, shot on a rainy day, were left laying on a section of bare tracks undergoing work. For more than a week, I passed this pair, unmoving and undisturbed, exactly how they were first shot. During this time, I contemplated a number of scenarios for their abandonment - the sad, the bad and the ugly. They finally disappeared when the area was cleaned, as the final work, for that section, went ahead and the plinths, between the sections of track, were put back into place.