One from 12-Dec

michswiss

rutt

So close to being a wow. I liked it immediately, but somehow all the elements don't fit together into a single story. Are the two men somehow a part of the same story or just juxtaposed by being in the same place at the same time?

michswiss

Thanks for the comment Rutt. There is no relationship between the man standing and the one enjoying his dinner; except that one was lucky enough to have a warm inside seat and the other, a chair outside in the cold by himself.

As Richard mentioned in another thread, there is an element of luck to street photography. I took about 10 shots of the supping man when there was no one in the doorway. It's frustrating that the one shot where he was perfectly poised, someone was walking out of the shop. He noticed me shortly after that and the moment was lost.

bdcolen

michswiss wrote:

Thanks for the comment Rutt. There is no relationship between the man standing and the one enjoying his dinner; except that one was lucky enough to have a warm inside seat and the other, a chair outside in the cold by himself.

As Richard mentioned in another thread, there is an element of luck to street photography. I took about 10 shots of the supping man when there was no one in the doorway. It's frustrating that the one shot where he was perfectly poised, someone was walking out of the shop. He noticed me shortly after that and the moment was lost.

I am clearly burning out here...
This is a very nice image. We don't need to know what the relationship is - in a sense, that's what takes it from being "photo journalism" to being street photography. A man is eating - another man, with an expression that could be read several ways, is entering the shop. Do the two men know each other? Are they related? Is the man entering the shop a hit man, coming to kill the soup eater? We don't know - it's called ambiguity, and it gives us a reason to return to the photo again and again.
When viewing the Edward Hopper exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, one could rent an audio player and listen to a discussion of many of the painting. The one which was the most intriguing - and fun - was that for the famous Nighthawks, the amazing painting of three customers and a server in a diner late at night. It's an erie painting, reproduced on a gazillion posters, including one in which the customers are James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and someone else. Anyway, the commentary was by Wim Wenders, the German film director, who reproduced the painting as a set within his 1997 movie "The End of Violence. Wenders spoke at length, and amusingly, about the cinematic nature of the painting, and said as he ended, that in the next moment a long, black sedan would pull around the corner and stop at the diner, and two men carrying guns would get out of the sedan and go into the diner...

Now, nothing in the painting shows that. Or does it? That kind of possibility is what really good street photography is all about.

rutt

I was just free-associating. It is a nice image, but I didn't go "wow". Trying to figure out why.

bdcolen

rutt wrote:

I was just free-associating. It is a nice image, but I didn't go "wow". Trying to figure out why.

I think the answer's pretty simple:
It's a nice image, but it's not a "wow."