little guardian

Few people know this, but I am a cat person. And by ‘few people’ I mean everyone who knows me. And by ‘cat person’ I mean I love cats to a point that I’m relatively certain everyone who knows me likely thinks that one day I will be a crazy old lady living with twenty cats.

And I am okay with that. Perhaps this is why they think that.

That would be the original reason that I chose to write on the picture above. I figured writing about something I find appeasing to both my eye and my interests would be easy enough. However, after about three different attempts at describing the photo I’ve decided to start over with this. It seems with each time I try to analyze this adorable picture I come up with different feelings, different ways of seeing the photo. Definite conclusions, at this point, are impossible. But as I’ve come to realize, it is quite difficult to look at something the same way twice when you look at it from a more technical aspect.

The piece is titled ‘little guardian’ and I saw the picture quite differently before I knew the name. I simply thought it was a cute picture of a kitten warming himself in the sun. After discovering the title, I found that it laughable. After all, how can a small young kitten guard anything? But the more and more I thought about it, and the more I looked at the picture with the title in mind, and the more I saw the small kitten as a guardian, I began to realize something about the cat in the large windowsill. With the heavy expression, the little kitten seemed overwhelmed or aged. Perhaps it was the soft light that caught the subject’s fur, or maybe how tiny he seems compared to the windowsill, but a simple glance at the picture and my eyes are drawn to the cat that seemed tired and weak.

The soft shape of the cat is really the only part of the photo that is curved in a definite way. The windowsill frames the subject with hard, straight lines. The background is out of focus and blurry, yet also has straight horizontal lines. Strangely enough, despite the cat being the softest and curviest point in the image, he seems to be a little ridged, cold even.

It raises questions. Why is the small cat sitting there, looking tired? Why did the artist decide to title the piece ‘little guardian’? What is he guarding really? There are many things about this picture that brings out the curiosity in me, but besides the interesting thoughts on the picture, it also tells me how influence a title can be to a photo. I cannot see the cat as anything other than a guardian now.

That being said, I am glad I view the photo the way I do now. I would have never thought the cat as a guardian on my own but now that I do I find it quite fitting and so much more interesting.