Unfair advantages?

Looking at a few blogs while I chewed through my breakfast granola, I passed one that's a series of photosfrom her day. (And if I've gotten confused and you/he is a dude, I apologize, it's happened before.) I've checked out her site in the past and liked it a lot, and this post is beautiful too, but there is something a bit different about this one...

She has it set to play that song from American Beauty, you know the one, that super-pretty but so dangerous to over-use piece, actually titled Any Other Name but you might recognize it as “The Plastic Bag Theme” (which must piss off Thomas Newman immensely).

The photos are very good, some of them are gorgeous and should be hung on the wall, but....with that song...everything is stunning.

Is that cheap? Is that skill? Marketing? Art?

Sometimes I see something and want to photograph it in black & white, but B&W seems like such a cheap way to fling gravitas onto an image. Even though my own photographic talents are admittedly minimal, I still dream of images that stand up for themselves, even in boring old color.

Or in this case, gloves drying on the street in Hong Kong.
It's not a very good picture, but with B&W, it's closer to good.

In color, it's a shoe.

In B&W, it's like...every shoe, man, that ever walked through a day, you know?, that carried the weight of dreams, the hopes of humanity, and the sweat of love, you know, man? This shoe, like, did things.

Looking through my own pictures is usually an exercise in disappointment (but that intersection looked so cool at the time!) but I think if I set up a gallery, lots of B&W, and had that song playing? People would buy them. Then maybe they'd take them home, and in the sterile lack of music they'd look at them and say “Wait, was this the one we picked?”

But there's a better question. If a song like that adds a readiness for reverence, an ease of admiration and propensity for esteem...what if you just lived that way? All the time. Would it cheapen and wear thin? Or would you reach a nirvana of awe and respect for...everything?