bruce_hooke

Very interested idea and execution.

 

The one thing I found a little disjointed was the leap from someone who looks to be in their 20's to someone who looks to be in their 80's. Maybe this was intentional but I figured you ought to at least know that this comes across as a "gap" or big jump in the sequence.

Beautiful light.

 

The central placement of the tree feels odd to me. It suggests a symmetry that does not actually exist in the photograph. If the tree was closer to the right edge it would balance out the visual weight of the hill on the left.

 

This, at least, is what I think the conventional thinking would be. At the least it is good to understand what the conventional thinking is so that when it is right to violate it you do so consciously and for a good reason.

I think of dramatic as including a touch of the ominous, as in looming storm clouds and similar things. A flock of birds flying past a setting sun with gentle clouds overhead is just not going to be ominous in that sense. On the other hand, if you are thinking of dramatic as simply meaning forceful then you are maybe getting closer to the mark you aimed for.

 

The choice I find most interesting in this photograph is the horizontal band of white clouds above the rounded form of the black tree. The relationship between these elements adds a layer of complexity to the image that keeps me thinking about it. The blue sky above the clouds is critical to creating this relationship. Cropping the image in the middle of the band of clouds creates a very different image.

 

My biggest problem with the image is in some ways personal. Sunsets almost always feel kind of obvious to me. It is VERY hard to do something original with a sunset. However, it all depends on your goals. Lots of people clearly like sunsets.

Every artistic medium comes with some baggage that derives from the history and nature of the medium. In the case of photography, one important piece of baggage is the expectation that a photograph, at some level, shows us something that actually happened rather than something that was simply imagined, as could easily be the case in a painting. Often this works to the advantage of the photographer. Part of photography's power comes from its closeness to real life. The feeling that "this could have been me" or "I could have been there" gives an immediate weight to a photograph that other media have to fight hard to reach.

 

However, one consequence of this baggage is that if a photograph has clearly been manipulated (or if we are told that a photograph has been altered in ways that significantly change the "reality" it conveys), questions will be asked and the photographer's choices will be challenged. If you don't like that, call the image something else, such as "digital artwork" or a "digital painting," and deal with whatever baggage those titles bring with them.

 

This is not to say that photographs should not be manipulated, just that when a photographer chooses to make such manipulations they should expect their choice to be raised in discussions about the photograph, and they should be ready to defend their choice on the basis of why it furthered their artistic goals for the image.

 

In the case of this image I see a clear difference in meaning between the original image and the final version. In the original my eye is drawn to the bright sky and the sense of expansive possibility it suggests. In the final version the horizon has become a wall and the focus shifts to the figure and the bright pool of light that surrounds, and to my eye seems to trap the figure, leading to the readings of the person having reached the end of the line and run out of options. If this is the feeling Lars was going for then I'd say that the manipulations were a success.

 

We could go even further and say that the texture in the sky could lead to the reading that the figure in the photograph has discovered a sense of the falseness of the world and this sense is being passed on to us, the viewers. In this reading, the fact that it is evident that the photograph was manipulated actually adds to the message.

Ooops. My last post should have been addressed to Mathieu. Sorry.

Anders,

 

I also have a geology background, but I am not sure how much of a role that plays in my reading of this image. I think if you try mentally inverting the direction of the ripples in the background dunes (i.e., take what you see as the crest of each ripple and make it the trough) you will see how different people could read the light as coming from different directions. I still see the light as more likely coming from the upper right rather than the lower left, but I can see how the other interpretation is possible.

 

That said, even if the light is coming from the upper right that does not make for conclusive proof that this is not a composite image. I leave that debate to others.

What suddenly hit me was that the background dunes can be read in two ways when it comes to light. Depending on how you look at it you can either see the light as coming from the lower left or as coming from the upper right. We can't really see the ripples in profile along the (supposed?) crest of the dune, which would make it clear what is up and what is down. Lacking that, I am more inclined to see the light as coming from the upper right, but I can easily see how someone else would see it as coming from the lower left.