Vanitas

The name is the Latin vanitas, meaning futility or emptiness, from Ecclesiastes 1:2: “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher.” The genre was especially popular with Dutch Baroque painters of the seventeenth century, and Spanish painters at the end of the Golden Age made such pictures too. Common symbols include skulls, rotting fruit, bubbles, smoke, watches, hourglasses, musical instruments, and cut flowers; extinguished candles, wine, and books also appear. It is closely tied to memento mori, “remember that you must die.” The National Center of Photography and Images takes up this tradition in Vanités, bringing together photographs from Taiwan and France to think about how to live in a world bound to fall apart: Territory uses microscope images, natural subjects, and images made while walking the land to reveal the human traces beneath its surface, and City looks at the gap between imagination and reality in the tide of urbanisation.

In each photograph, find one thing that will vanish, decay, or run out; it plays the part a skull or an hourglass plays in a painting.

What in this photograph is in the middle of disappearing?