Worth Keeping

I was out to dinner with a friend last night and she asked a question I woke up thinking about. What happened to beauty in the world? You never see beauty anymore. And our capacity for appreciating that beauty is what makes us human.

She said it offhand, the way people say true things, and it landed because I have been circling the same question since a trip to Paris.

It is not that Paris is beautiful. Plenty of places are beautiful. It is that so little of it has been thrown away. You walk through doors hung before anyone in my family was born, on hinges someone has been oiling for two hundred years. The zinc counter is worn into a dip where forty thousand elbows have gone. Nothing there is new and almost nothing is ruined, because somebody in every generation decided the thing was worth keeping and knew how to keep it. A city like that is not an aesthetic. It is an accumulation of decisions to repair.

Then you fly home, and the contrast is not subtle. Here, most of what surrounds us was made by no one. Not literally, but you cannot find the person in it. The sweater pills after three washes because it was knit thin on purpose. The dresser is particleboard with a photograph of oak printed on top. The failure is not a defect. It is a schedule, designed by a company that needs you back in ninety days. A thing breaks, you feel nothing, and you order the replacement before you have finished throwing the first one away. Nobody grieves an object that was never anyone's work.

For most of human history, art was not something you went to see. It was something you ate off of. The spoon had a shape somebody chose. The door had a handle a smith made with his hands, and you touched it four times a day for forty years, and the brass wore down where your palm went. The chair was joined rather than assembled. The blanket was woven by a woman whose grandmother taught her the pattern, and you could tell whose it was. Beauty was distributed through ordinary life at close range. It was in the objects you used without ceremony, made by people who lived nearby and whose names you knew.

We took all of that and moved it into museums, where it sits behind glass and gets called craft, and then we filled our houses with things that no one made. The art did not disappear. We removed it from the places where it used to live, and then we wondered why the rooms feel like nothing.

And the makers went with it. Skill is not stored anywhere. It lives in hands, and it dies in one generation of nobody paying for it. When you buy the good coat, you are not buying a coat. You are keeping alive a person who knows how to cut a shoulder, and the possibility that she will teach somebody else.

So buy the good coat. But buying well is the easy half. The harder half is what you do when it breaks, because it will. Take the shoes to be resoled. Have the coat relined, the hem let down, the knife reground, while there is still someone within driving distance who can do it. Someone will tell you it would be cheaper to replace it. That person is not wrong about the money and is wrong about everything else. Repair is the only relationship with an object that deepens over time. Everything else is transaction.

I keep coming back to a single fact, which is that nothing cheap has ever developed a patina. Good things get better. Linen loses its stiffness and becomes the best thing you own. Leather takes the shape of what you carry. Wood grays and holds the weather in it, which is why a hundred year old pier is worth looking at and a new one is not. These materials are keeping a record of your life and giving it back to you as surface. Cheap things begin at their best moment, the one in the photograph, and every day after is a subtraction.

Buy less. Buy things made by a person who is still alive. When they break, take them to somebody who can fix them. Keep them long enough that they look like yours, and then long enough that they can look like somebody else's. A city is only the sum of people who decided a thing was worth keeping. So is a house. So is a life.

Fresh Wood

Risky Invitation, 2025

They are rebuilding the piers. Three in Gulfport, the Ken Combs at the foot of Courthouse Road, the Fred Urie, the Libby Milner Roland. One in Long Beach, the Jim Simpson, where the new decking went down this month. The Gulfport piers reopened one after another this year, ribbon cuttings and speeches. Long Beach is nearly finished.

If you did not grow up watching this coast, the history takes a minute. A hurricane finds this beach every few years, and the piers stand out in open water and take the worst of it. They have been battered and built back so many times that the rebuilding is part of what a pier is around here. The last round came in 2020, when Cristobal and Zeta came through months apart and took them apart deck by deck. The gulf keeps taking the piers and we keep putting them back, which tells you something about both parties.

For six years they stood broken, and last year they became nearly the entire focus of my photography. I should try to explain that, because on paper a wrecked pier is not much. A ruined pier is mostly absence. The deck is gone. What remains is a line of pilings walking out into the water until the water wins, gray above the tide line and black below it, each one eaten to its own height. No two are the same and all of them agree on a direction. Give the shutter a minute and the gulf goes to fog and the pilings stand in it like the only permanent thing in the frame, which is a lie the photograph tells. Photographing them is an obsession.

And it is time. I want to say that clearly, because this is not a preservationist's complaint. You cannot walk on a ruin. You cannot fish from it, or teach a kid to crab off the side of it, or stand over the water you live next to, which is the entire purpose of a pier. What the storms left standing is dangerous, and a pier exists for people, not for photographers. The new ones are honest about what they are for. Concrete caps, stainless hardware, decking spaced so the next surge passes through it instead of prying it loose. They are built the way you build something you intend to keep, and after Katrina, nobody on this coast needs the lesson explained.

But I cannot help the feeling of loss when the fresh wood goes down. A new pier is beautiful the way new things are beautiful, which is to say not yet. Clean lines, bright lumber, every board the same. Everything I photographed is exactly what got engineered out of it, and I grieve it anyway.

What I keep arriving at is that the ruin was never the subject. Time was the subject. The pilings were just where you could see it. And time is not being demolished, it is being handed a blank deck. The gulf started on the new wood the day the ribbon was cut. In forty years somebody will stand at the end of the Jim Simpson with a camera, and the pier will have earned it.

So I am not mourning, exactly. I am changing tenses. I have been photographing what the water finished, and now I get to watch it start.