Photo Challenge

Numbers

Equations. Clock faces. Cash registers. Numbers are everywhere: this week, share a photo that puts them front and center.

I was strolling along the streets and canals of Los Angeles’ Venice Beach recently. It’s a lovely, rapidly changing neighborhood: the old and the new often collide, but the endearingly shabby seems to live in surprising harmony with all things cutting edge (and pricy).

It’s also a mightily photogenic place. Which makes me a bit embarrassed to admit that my favorite sight was… a row of mailboxes:

venice-mailboxes

I’m not sure what it was about them that I found so captivating. Their effortless vintage-ness? The fact that the building’s residents cared enough to make them so… cute? Or maybe the promise of each family’s story, already hinted at by the empty stroller (and even by those cacti): just pick one box, and whole lives might pour out.

Ultimately, I saw these numbers — presented in the simplest, most predictable of sequences — as an invitation to wonder about people and the place they live in.

Numbers are all around us at home and on the street, in airports and supermarkets, on signs and on our clothes. I can’t wait to see your take on this week’s challenge — what will your numbers show?

Show Comments

109 Comments

Close Comments

Join the conversation!

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

Comments

  4. It’s good you found the numbers captivating… imagine if the plants were the main attraction. You wouldn’t have had a challenge for us this week… they look rather ill!! 😉

    Liked by 4 people

    Reply

    1. Love this post more and more! It’s really all about the meaning we attach to numbers, how rigid and unimaginative we can be about that. As Cousin Albert might say, “It’s all relative.”

      Liked by 4 people

      Reply

      1. Thank you, Priscilla. When I’m traveling or swamped, I will repost something that my newer followers haven’t or would never seen, especially if it is just right for a theme. It helps to know you don’t mind!

        Liked by 2 people

  11. As a person that can memorize numbers very well, this post is awesome to me. The color scheme makes it even more remarkable. Numbers are the building blocks of childhood education, and they are the future.

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply

  18. The story you wrote with such eloquent words, thoughts, ideas, images, views, perspectives, visions and wonder in numbers on mailboxes painted the picture so nicely that I enjoyed it tremendously as I read it and each little word and the question marks so neatly put in the proper places. Thank you. I give it a # 1 – the Best! Thank you so very much for this piece. Kind regards, me, kerasotes :)’s

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply

419 Responses While this challenge is closed to new entries, we encourage you to visit the Reader to find other avid bloggers.