Street Life

The squeaking allegory of a deeply disturbed society

Does this squeaky plastic duck "made in China" with the stylized portrait of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, offered in practically every Salzburg souvenir shop, permit conclusions about a hopelessly desperate and intellectually depraved Austrian tourism industry, tasteless to an offensive degree and evidently stuck in a creative rigor mortis?

Or rather about the obvious degree of indifference and condescension, about the blatant lack of interpersonal respect, about the amount of alleged intellectual imbecility the people in charge of this tasteless piece of plastic junk show towards domestic and foreign visitors of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's birthplace?

Just when you thought carrying tons of PA and light show equipment, noisy baboons with names like “DJ Beer Fart” and gallons of hard liquor to artificially snow-covered, once largely peaceful and idyllic mountain slopes signify the worst mental outgrowth of the Austrian tourism industry, you're left stunned by products bred out by human brain power evidently hardly above a life-sustaining level.

he living proof of the necessesity of stem-cell research?

Salzburg, Austria. June 2013.

Canon EOS 5D Mk II, EF 24-70 mm f 2.8 @ 70 mm, ISO 200, f 1:5.6, 1/50 s.