David, your choice of the verb “celebrate” is polemical and provocative, yet has nothing to do with me, with my reasons for making this photograph—it was visually striking, first, and second, it contains a paradox or conundrum I’ll address in the third paragraph.
The boy or teenager who presumably painted this swastika beneath a railroad bridge in a small town (There’s the context for you) certainly knew he was violating decency, taste, taboo, etc. It isn’t like painting on the wall at town hall or the floor of a school gym or the window of a Jewish tailor. It’s a vicious experiment; it could be a gang induction test; but it is hidden from plain view, so it was done by a scared kid or by a coward.
The image itself offers another story, namely that whatever humans do for whatever reasons vicious or righteous will survive the attention of other natural processes. In a few years, this swastika will vanish beneath mud dauber cells, unless the spiders that prey on them drive them away. Or eventually a CSX trestle maintenance crew will find it and sandblast it, along with the peace symbol someone else painted a few feet away.
As for me, I’ll photograph anything I think deserves a seeing. I’ve offered an account of the circumstances of this photograph, because I respect you and think your comment deserves an answer, but ultimately the photograph deserves to be considered without the photographer’s rationale, and more importantly, without prejudice or sanctimony.
Most people exist on a diet of self-reinforcing visual cliches. If an image like this gives a shock, that’s a message from one’s own nervous system, not from the image itself. The problem lies with the interpreter, not, in this case, with the photographer.