Well I’ve made another written description of a photograph… I mean its just an idea really. Our project is an investigation into the verasity of the photographic image and I suppose there is a connection with the perceived truthfulness of words and the importance of a single viewer standpoint which interests me:
I’ve just had loads of feedback from my Facebook posting which has given me further ideas to follow up.
Photograph 2
It is a photograph of a large green space that looks like a park. It is landscaped into specific areas including a herbaceous border close by, a path, and then a large open grassed area with a wilder area far off bordered by a stand of mature trees.
At first sight this photograph has a doughnut composition so that the area that you would expect to contain the bulk of the information, the centre, is empty and the real action takes place around the edges of the view. But there is a clever sting in the tail of the arrangement. Rather that looking directly at the characters that inhabit the borders of this photograph the eye is consistently pulled towards a distant course of trees and particularly the area where these trees meet the sky, which is right in the middle of the photograph. The figures present in the landscape seem to be either leaving or arriving at the very fringes of the scene. Josh has cleverly pulled the viewer into a dreamlike state and I stare into the trees aimlessly enjoying the dislocation that distance allows me. I am aware of the people who inhabit my peripheral vision but I have to wrench my eyes away from the view to really check them out.
In the middle distance, on the far left of the print, three teenage lads are running on the open grass between the far tree line and us. They are about one stride away from exiting the scene altogether. I can make out trainers not football boots so I imagine they are doing athletics exercises rather than playing a team game. The two boys at the front are black and the third is white. They are all dressed similarly in sweat pants and sweatshirts but it is not a uniform and each one has a singular colour scheme. The front boy has black sweat pants, a white shirt tucked in and grey or patterned trainers. The second boy has navy sweat pants, a red shirt left loose and white trainers and the last boy has a red shirt tucked into royal blue sweat pants and white trainers. The leading and last boys are slim and this is reflected in their high mid stride position, the middle boy looks in slightly less good shape and his position seems slower, more laboured somehow.
