Home Alone!!

Nice image. Title not required !

I agree as well that the strong PP does not add to the subject. The wall on the LHS is so massive that it compets with the figure for attention, and the whole is not natural looking, as it should have been.

Pnina, it just could be, that the stonewall is a subject on equal foot with the woman. It is not because we have a woman (or a man, for that sake) in the frame, that we have to consider it prisoned in the category of "portrait".

Pnina: I disagree, to the extent that the stone wall may serve to emphasize and underscore the many hardships the subject has had to face.

Anders,and michael ,it does not have to be, but I think that the photographer aimed for the woman, hence the title(good one or not). and the PP of her face and cloths showed her hard life. As it is the POW, we can think differently.... BUT..what I think is important, are the honesty of the critiques given, and here we dont have differences..;-))

When it comes to honesty, Pnina, we have never been in competition.
One could elaborate on the continuum of genres of scenes with people and their dwellings. When does a documentary scene become a portrait, or the other way round ?
In the case of the POTW, I tend to see it more as documentary, than portraiture (maybe despite the ill chosen title) so that the landscape, the corrugated iron sheet (?), the woman (her clothes, her face, her eyes..), the open door and not least the stone wall, are all elements of documentary value telling a story of rural life in Northern India. If I should see it as first of all a portraiture, I would have, as you Pnina, focused it more on the woman and certainly less on the stone wall.

Anders,thanks for your first sentence..;-))

Idid not see it as a portrait per se, but the wide form of it,with the surrounding as well. For me there is enough "framing" around the figure and composition wise a bit less from that massive wall would have the same effect on the whole. (MPOW)...

Nice shot, but terrible title. It's not amusing - is it even true? There could be others in her dwelling, or out in the fields.

Going through the discussion, I would like to elaborate on some aspects. Travelling on the Manali-Leh highway, in the middle of nowhere we come upon this house made of stacked stones, with not a soul in sight. The title came from that observation that she was alone there, it's tacky no doubt but nothing better came to mind. I couldn't communicate with her (different languages) but through my driver I could find out that she ran a tea-stall from her dwelling and that there was nobody else there. When I saw the texture of the stones, I had to include that so that the subject can be placed in her surroundings. That was the whole point. The image is very slightly cropped from the original just to cut down a bit of the boulder on the right. The focus of the PP was also to bring out the grittiness of life, which colour at times mutes out. Focus also had to be tight, because of my shooting position. The house/dwelling was on a raised incline and there was stone boulders placed to get there. Positioning myself there did not give me much flexibility. Michael Chang- this was shot with a dSLR.

Subhadip

The shot is good, I think I would have titled along the lines of "Woman and dwelling off the Manali-Leh Highway" or similar - something neutral and informative. When you add a jokey title like Home Alone the expression is a cliché in English and also has connotations of the set of US comedy films called Home Alone (and HA II and III etc), so it detracts from what otherwise is an interesting and serious picture.

I love the story in this photo...and the drama of the B&W....excellent.

Lovely story. Thanks for sharing :D I feel like this photograph is very heavily weighted toward the center, and that doesn't quite work for me in this case. Also, what others said about the title, yes.