Not a meaningless cup of cofee

Strangely, the most feautureless objects condense marketing symbols. For example, this is a simple snapshoot I took yeasterday randomly in a McDonald's in Milan where a friend of mine was waiting for me. As you see, it is only a cofee paper-cup with tre common symbol: a cofee seed, an heart and a cup. If you look twice, your brain immediatly connects these three normally meaningless elements to the pleasure of drinking an hot cofee while outside is raining or snowing or with a cheerful company.

Once upon a time, Saint Exupery said that essential is invisible to the eyes. This time, I have to disagree with the Little Prince.

photo by Giulia Agostini: I love this photo I took in a vain afternoon in Milan because I consider it to be a part of the visual culture which we live in. Unfortunately, the pic could appear a little over-exposed, but I had to enlighten it a bit digitally the original one, otherwise it was impossible to catch some details because of the uploading on a blog- the snap looked too dark. First of all, I worked out an evolution in my tecnique with my simple (but not less good) Sony dsc-t200, Zeiss lens, 8mpx.For example, the focus is on the three symbols that were my subjects. Then, I found the perfect light that pays attention to the cup and gives the right shadows. It seems as if the shadow of the cup says to you that there's something behind the object and, actually, that's what I meant to do. Furthermore, the symbols and the cup suggest that you should be in a meeting moment, full of people, like a cofee bar is, while the object stands alone in its material and inhuman solitude. If the cofee cup is functional to the social human life, its existence depends on that one without having its own. Strangely, without human feelings and social needs, it has no meaning, no reason to exist, no function, no life. Even more strangely, the cup of cofee stands there on the table in front of us to remind us of our social life and its function as means to assolve it. Do we really need that a dumb paper-cup reminds us of it? Does it mean that we are forgetting the meaning of having a rest and taking a cofee with a good friend? Are we moving towards the cup? Is our life becoming the life of a half-drinked, steaming cofeecup in a multinational company bar?