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Not even your camera click could divert her attention.Excellent image!

Meilleures salutations-Laurent

To begin, I have a strong bias in not getting much out of shots of people immersed in cell phone activity. They seem so ubiquitous. A little like shooting fish in a barrel. I find this a technically very nice shot, the clarity, the detail, the angle of the wall trim against the angle of the bench which forms a sort of triangle, and the angle of your perspective to the wall which suggests an energetic diagonal. The pink against the black is eye catching for sure. But I don't get much of a narrative or feeling here. 

The fact that the image doesn't convey much of a narrative or a feeling is exactly my point.  Americans seem to be so immersed in the use of electronic gizmos like cell phones that the activity has become totally commonplace.  This person easily could be hanging out on this bench, enjoying whatever she got from Starbucks and digging the great weather.  Instead, she's buried in her cell phone. This is the story I was trying to tell.

You make an interesting point worth pursuing, which I hope you don't mind. I'm going to ask this point blank. What's the difference between a situation with no feeling and no narrative and a photo with no feeling and no narrative. Consider this. What's the difference between a good photo about boredom and a boring photo? 

Arguably a good photograph about boredom will have certain strong elements, as will any other good photograph, regardless of the subject matter.  On the other hand, a boring photograph won't have at least one strong element that will grab a viewer's attention.

OK, I know you're going to take me to task on this.  Fire away.

No, won't take you to task at all on those thoughts. There are probably many other answers, but yours seems a good one.

I think this photo, as I mentioned, has some strong graphic and color elements but its lack of a point of view, narrative, or expressive element leaves me a bit distanced and a bit cold. Now, again, one might say, "Well I wanted you to feel distanced and cold." But there's a difference, IMO, between being empathetically distanced and cold to a distanced and cold situation portrayed in a photo and simply being cold to the photo itself. I'm not sure I'm being clear. In other words, there's a coldness and distance, even a disinteredness that engages me and actually interests me when expressed photographically. And then there are some photos that just don't engage or interest me. It seems like a fine line but I actually think there's a big difference.

Some of my favorite examples are pictures by and of Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. Some of them show and express an incredible sense of ennui. But that's just it, they are unbelievably expressive of that ennui. I don't just SEE it, I FEEL it, palpably. 

THIS is the best example I could find online of what I'm talking about with Patti and Robert. It's less than an ideal example because she at least engages with the camera here. In her book, Just Kids, there are many photos that are a bit more narrative-less and less engaged, really conveying a type of "nothing much-ness" but in a very expressive way. 

"Nothing much-ness" seems to tell it all, Fred.  

:-)

Michael, I especially like the ambiguity inhering in the title. . . .

--Lannie