Photo Challenge

Monument

The Eiffel Tower? Stonehenge? Your town’s sole traffic light? For this week’s photo challenge, blow us away with your take on the monumental.

The Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri. Photo by Ben Huberman.

Standing right beneath the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri, looking up as it tapered elegantly into the sky, I felt endlessly minuscule. Yet there was something comforting in knowing that other people were right there next to me, experiencing the same emotions (and taking the same shots).

Monuments — both big and small — are strange like that. They insist on their own importance, but at the same time allow locals and tourists, pilgrims and accidental visitors, to share a moment and to get a taste of each other’s stories.

gateway arch weekly photo challenge monumental

The Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri. Photo by Ben Huberman.

My favorite photo from that visit doesn’t show the Arch’s true grandeur — it shows how, despite its incredible size, it’s still a human monument, one created by and for others like us.

In this week’s challenge, show us your take on a monument (broadly defined). It could be a fresh angle on a well-known tourist site, or a place nobody knows outside your community. It doesn’t even have to be an official monument. A legendary coffeehouse, a churchyard cemetery, the remains of a treehouse you’d built as a kid — anything can be monumental as long as it’s imbued with a shared sense of importance.

– Ben

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      1. Devils Tower is a lot harder to mask than the Arch, I guess. Such a beautiful/strange place.

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      2. I was just going to post something about the links not changing color. I thought it was just my slow internet. Plus, I didn’t get an email for the WPC. But, honestly, I like that there are no pingbacks. I get so tired of my comments filled with pingbacks from posters who never even look at my post.

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