This image started life as a kind of accident. That was part of the beauty of film, sometimes you made mistakes and discovered that you liked the look of the mistake more than the initial intention.
When photography started to be practiced in earnest it allowed painters to stop trying to accurately reproduce subjects. The need for verisimilitude vanished, taken over by the new medium. Now that stock photography can provide for straightforward documentation of just about any subject under the sun does that free photographic artists to transmute their reality to correspond to a new aesthetic? A new mindset of creation?
There's so much I love about the photo above. The obscuring of the right side of her face, the bold, graphic, black shadows that run at diagonal through the frame. The look of surprise and disbelief on the subject's face. The belt buckle echoing here lone visible eye. The way one side of the subject's blouse is lighter than the tone of the background while the other side is much darker. And finally, the undulation of tones across the otherwise flat background.
The photograph seems to pose a question with no answers. It works not as an information conduit but as an freestanding object where the graphic patterns and contrasts are at least as important as an inventory of the content.
Harder to define. More fun to look at. All this image needs is a manifesto....
