Tuesday, February 06, 2007
Stairway To...
Comments:
Enigmatic was my first thought on opening this. I just have to ask, why the stairs? It has humour because of the apparent incongruous collection of subjects in the image.
I won't let myself off with the humour exemption this time.
In a way this photo is unbalanced. The black gate is too black. the window is too tightly cropped. The stairs are a bit bullet composition. But the whole ends up greater than the sum of the parts. One wouldn't want the 7 prayer mats cut off, nor the sackcloth hidden. Another angle might make it too obvious there is nowhere at the top of the steps. The blackness of the gate even serves to emphasise that they are not an important part of the picture.
So, a simple reaction: a graceful joke.
Rather the opposite to Colin (with his elegantly-expressed comment) I find the single elements most captivating and the whole slightly awkward. In fact the centre-piece for me is the sackcloth (?): every time I hit on it I think that there is someone asleep underneath it. But each individual detail says something about the place - and maybe that's what Colin means.
As a parallel, the most ridiculous sight that I remember is a motorway spur in Glasgow that had been propelled out as a flyover only to stop, unfinished, halfway out over the West end of the city.
I see the sack as the strongest element here, more so than those odd stairs. Overall I'm not entirely sure what to take from this image; there's some curiosity re: what's under the sack, what those stairs are about and there's also a feeling of modernity coming from the building. It looks like a relatively new prefab.
I keep coming back to this picture, not really knowing what to say and not even entirely sure that I like this photo. Fortunately Kate came to the rescue. After seeing this frame appear on my screen many times over the last week, she piped up this morning with " I really like this photo. It not about the subject, but the values."
She went on to explain how the tonal range led her eye from the window, to the white rectangles on the pavement, to the stairs, to the sign, where the diagonal of the sign mimicks the trash bag on the ground.
Apparently there is more here than meets the eye.
... the second floor.
This is a small apartment building and those stairs will take you to the second floor. When I walked past it the first time I needed to back-track as I wondered why someone would place those stairs so close to a window. Whilst composing the shot and looking at the colours I was dealing with I thought I may be able to create some kind of optical illusion that these stairs went nowhere. Added to that the composition (i.e. unbalanced), the elements in the shot and final contrast adjustments I tried to create an even more hap-hazzard nay awkward result. Think I got there...
Many thanks for the comments and thoughts.
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In a way this photo is unbalanced. The black gate is too black. the window is too tightly cropped. The stairs are a bit bullet composition. But the whole ends up greater than the sum of the parts. One wouldn't want the 7 prayer mats cut off, nor the sackcloth hidden. Another angle might make it too obvious there is nowhere at the top of the steps. The blackness of the gate even serves to emphasise that they are not an important part of the picture.
So, a simple reaction: a graceful joke.
As a parallel, the most ridiculous sight that I remember is a motorway spur in Glasgow that had been propelled out as a flyover only to stop, unfinished, halfway out over the West end of the city.
She went on to explain how the tonal range led her eye from the window, to the white rectangles on the pavement, to the stairs, to the sign, where the diagonal of the sign mimicks the trash bag on the ground.
Apparently there is more here than meets the eye.
This is a small apartment building and those stairs will take you to the second floor. When I walked past it the first time I needed to back-track as I wondered why someone would place those stairs so close to a window. Whilst composing the shot and looking at the colours I was dealing with I thought I may be able to create some kind of optical illusion that these stairs went nowhere. Added to that the composition (i.e. unbalanced), the elements in the shot and final contrast adjustments I tried to create an even more hap-hazzard nay awkward result. Think I got there...
Many thanks for the comments and thoughts.