Goodbye to Dick and Jane

...and Sally and Puff and Spot...

Now only a barren wasteland with only the sparse color to enjoy. Dick and Jane have grown up and become lawyers in accidental injury and death suits. Ambulance chasers. Yet, once they jumped from these swings from the highest point. Funny how it all goes around! Or, keeps a swingin.

 

Merely thoughts,

 

TK

Thanks. It goes along with my own thoughts. More later.

"Thou hast nor youth nor age

But as it were an after dinner sleep

Dreaming of both."

 

The static swings, swings my imagination. I start visualising Dick & Jane and....

Admirable composition with the just amount of colors, to enhance the beauty of this image.

This photo acts like a magnet on me (surprise, surprise). Besides my initial reaction was: where is all the snow? This must be shot during last summer? But the EXIF-data tells something else, daily goodies. You are lucky -by my gut feeling- no freezing fingers to operate the camera, no footprints on the snow to destroy the ground, so to say. You have been on this playground earlier too, what I recall...

 

You mentioned awhile back that you were to follow the "assume you're at wrong place" guideline. Makes me ask of pure curiosity how did you approach this particular POV? Purely intuitively, by feel, or as a result of some circling around first? I remember you have told earlier about your shooting style in general, but still nice to have a little chat about this, if you don't mind.

Thanks for coming by and Amal, thanks also for the lovely line of poetry which I found so bittersweet. In these crazy times, small gestrues and acts of kindness move me perhaps more than they would in ordinary days. I feel a bit raw nowadays. Markku. I try to remember what you said about assume you're in the wrong place and moved around quite a bit on this shot. I was initially attracted by the primary colors on the playground equipment. I changed my vantage point several times to isolate the swings and yellow barrier. Even then, I had to work a bit in post production to crop it and eliminate any background distraction. For me the empty swings is a poignant image; the plainess of the image and the poster paint colors carries me back to a simpler time, back to my first reader which opened the door to my imagination and sparked a life-long love of reading. The playground is empty now. Goodbye Dick. Goodbye Jane

You are The Genius Jack!

Thanks for explanation.You did a good work in including all those primary colors and putting them in successful composition. It was probably a best moment to shoot this scene, the foreground being in shadow and thus getting some natural weight. The overall yellowish ting mimics the mood of dear memories.

 

Talking about the "Assume": to be fair those were the words of certain Fred Picker, founder of Zone VI Studios, whose regular customer I was in early 80s. He was my first mentor in Zone System (via his books and newsletters), few months before Ansel Adams entered my bookshelf too. Now you know, we (former) Large Format photographers are quite picky when it comes to POV. ;-)

A truly masterful photo. It displays a degree of processing that I do not usually see in your posts. Either that, or you just plain deceive me. But the composition and processing are really magnificent. I'm sure a lot of Pnetters might not feel the same, but I do think your frame is an excellent enhancement as well. Congratulations.

Artistic visual senses at its maximum expression!! Congrats!

Such a beautiful piece, all the way around. Just the visual properties alone are fantastic, well lit, smoothly captured, expertly composed. But it has that certain emotional something that makes a person sit still for a while. And feel.

Sometimes the skiff of your life feels balanced, the course is right and you find yourself bouncing along without a care, the sun on your face and the wind in your hair. Other times you feel like a piece of mutton being slowly stewed in a pressure cooker. I'm more mutton right now and I think that stuff coming from my ears is steam. But, paradoxically, these also seem the times when you are closer to the core, down where the magma is churning. You find images appearing unbidden, bits of emotional memory broken free from the interior rock caverns by the internal pressure and blasted upward where they echo again, briefly and achingly. When you can lay hold of one of these emotionally-laden images long enough to produce a photograph, the resulting picture has a kind of truth and lack of artiface that you can recognize and it often seems to resonates with others, too. That's the way I feel about this picture and when I look at it, I become aware just how superficial some of my other work is.

Oh, I loved those stories! I can see them and feel them. Thank you for connecting this image to such wonderful memories of my childhood.

 

How old are you, for heaven's sake? We must stick together more often.

When I opened my Dick and Jane reader in the first grade, the year was 1949. I can still recall the pages with their large, clunky, printed words and wonderfully cheerful pastel pictures. It was all so simple then - Spot running, Sally looking, while Dick and Jane laughed and laughed. Words were magic to me back then. I couldn't wait to see what would happen next.

Poignant photo indeed! I used to love reading those Dick and Jane books...Spot was of course my favorite character. Looking at this image makes me recall my childhood and swinging in swings after homework was done...giving my Teddy a ride, enjoying the balmy southern California weather year round. I have been feeling very sad lately missing my own children who also would swing on swings like these...slurping on popcicles. This is a great photo; thank you so much for sharing it! :)

wow. i love this pic and i was anxious to comment-- seeing however that you're already blanketed in praise and adoration, i'll just move on to others of the myriad of unsung photos out there. cheers.

a work that builds it strengths on emotions, colors and proportion. Visual poetry. Thanks sensei, ciao, Giuseppe

Wow!!! Wonderful shot...fantastic colors and composition...thought provoking...my best

I'm writing a short story about Dick and Jane, so this got my attention right away. It has a definite poignancy to it: the empty playground, the POV which excludes other places. The color is telling and effective... One thing bothers me. This is a 'modern' playground--plastic seats, safety mats, approved surface. It jars me out of the Dick and Jane world, where it is forever 1959.

The color! The composition, the framing. This is art, Jack!

Colors and perspective are great!

well seen, I am not so sure about the composition as the blue pole is leading my eyes out of the frame. cheers Jana