So, I was thinking about swamps and humans’ relationships with them, and I realized something interesting. In earlier times in Europe, there was quite a bit of wetland, swamp land included. The swamps and wetlands were a subject of much folklore, cultural works, paintings, and so on. Many artists and scientists liked to venture out into the wetlands for creative inspiration or scientific study. But, the people’s appreciation of the wetlands stops here. The wetlands harbored organisms that caused hazards and diseases to humans. The wetlands could not be farmed efficiently. You could not build a house or an office on the wetlands. Owners of wetlands were appraised with lower real estate property values than non-wetland owners. In summary, human society around the area thought of the wetlands mainly as a giant playground, but ultimately they had no practical business use. In light of economic pressures, or the sheer desire to make more money for oneself, many people drained the wetlands to increase the real estate property value, decrease their insurance rates, and in general improve the economy as they saw it. That’s how we got to the wetland barren world that we live in today.
The wetlands were an example of an “ugly place.” Despite this fact, they were a wildly popular subject to paint. The same phenomenon can be observed in photography. Does a building look ugly or junky? All the better for photography. Now, as we have learned, this is where things can get dicey. The creative photographer loves to photograph run-down buildings, but the owner of the building in question is rarely as enthusiastic. So, yeah, this is one very important difference between between photographing the natural world versus photographing the artificial world. But, when legal considerations are permitting, there really isn’t much that would be considered “ugly” from the eyes of a creative photographer.