This image lifts the not so interesting ordinary to the very interesting ordinary. The woman is engaged and candid, the car has unfolded into unusually shaped and arrayed planes, the scene is modestly tilted and the sky is unsettled and grainy. The sense of instantaneous imbalance is captivating and worth a prolonged look. Photographer as alchemist.
There is of course a barrier between the viewer and whatever it is that the viewer sees in the photo.
You could call that barrier a door.
You could call that barrier two doors. She threatens to close the first door. The second door... why, that's near enough for us to grab it, to prevent her from closing it, or to close it ourselves, or to pull it open further.
It took me some effort to write this out, but I am merely describing the very first thing I felt when I saw the image... the physics of two doors belonging to the same body. and every part of this image contributes to that effect. I know you're not Michelangelo laboring over every square inch of your canvas, you're just a lucky so-and-so who knows which photos are lucky... but really you and Michelangelo are the same, the gods of imagery are smiling upon you.
Viewed objectively, it looks like a hurried snapshot. But why view it objectively? Objectivity in art is a desensitiser; you prevent yourself from seeing the wood because you're too busy counting the trees, ticking the boxes, judging the work by some dispassionate external criteria of what's 'good'. All that leaden stuff about tilted horizons, tonal range, sharpness, etc, will take the resolutely objective viewer away from this picture, rather than toward it. And when that happens, the resultant 'failure' of the work is the viewer's fault, and not the artist's.
Instead get inside the picture and find out how it feels. It feels different, original, daring. And it's not as snapshotish as it first seems, either. The doors of the Lexus echo the great soaring arches and sweeping curves of modern architecture. I mean public buildings; nobody constructs buildings like that with their own money. Ordinary people, real people, grapple with that extravagant vanity ... just as we see with this lady, struggling to make it fit her, or her fit it. Struggling to make sense of it.
I'm being wildly fanciful of course, but wildly fanciful is what makes art of life, and life of art. This is both: life, and art.
Please accept the Curse of the Red Thumb, and my thanks for an original, interesting photograph.
Cool capture. It's as if there are three slices of depth to this, like three separate photos (of the front door, of her, and of the background, which seems entirely detached as well) have been stuck together. Looking closer it's as if her hand is her link to here and now, grasping, while she is fighting fading away into the dreamy yet ubiquitous wash of parking lots and overpasses. Cool photo.
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