Pulled in. I missed this its last few trips through. I am grateful for the comments helping me see this image. I have learned because of DPC why this is a pertfect image.
It's now more than two years since I first looked at this picture. I still think of it often. I actually do hear the thin and distorted marching music, broadcast through a cheap public address system, displaced slightly in time from what I'm seeing. As if the visuals and the audio have slipped slightly out of synch.
It's one of the tiny treasure trove of pictures on DPC that I most revere because it is so effortlessly evocative. It is unmistakably a picture from my own history, depicting an event I never attended at a place I have never been. And yet it is me. It is my history, my memory, my picture.
It's not a picture of a thing. It is what I said in the section of my original comment entitled "Documentary v Recollection". That is, it is an echo of a thing. And it's the echo that has the indelible meaning, and not the thing.
Everything that makes photographs magical is in this one. So rare, so perfect, so beautiful. Marla, thank you.
I agree Henry the pinholes don't usually score well ( unless made by whiteroomor my clever brother pointandshoot). But the score doesnt really matter. I am grateful there are people here that appreciate them.
Thanks again for all of the wonderful comments.
I was another of your 10's. I'm delighted to see Ubique thumbed you. For my part, I'm blown away by the Dachshund, and the emergent T-bird (my Aunt had one just like that) is sublime :-)
I thought this might be a pinhole. The fact that this scored so poorly and yet received wonderful praise is something worth contemplating. Makes me feel good just knowing I appreciated it. Congratulations on your well deserved bling.
Going back for some comments-
I gave this a 10--
I love the look of this.
I almost feel like the car might of dictated the style of processing to give it that 50's photo feel.
I could be way off base but I still really liked it..
This is my top pick, so let’s get that out of the way first: it’s the cursed Order of the Blue Thumb for you, plus a 10.
WTF? Why my top pick? It’s a negligent photograph as far as conventional craftsmanship goes. Blurry, indistinct, distant, and taken after the marchers have passed so we don’t even know who or what they are. That’s enough to warrant curt dismissal of the picture by many viewers and especially (alas) by most photographers who are disadvantaged by their very fixed, and limiting, idea of what makes a good photograph.
Exquisite Negligence But the negligence in this photograph is not only deliberate; it’s also beautifully judged, both in conception and execution. Negligent, low-fidelity photographs are fairly easy to do badly (see some of my own crap), and exquisitely difficult to do well. And this one is done far better than ‘well’. It’s quite sublime.
Transcendental This photograph is not itself a parade of course, but nor is it merely a picture of a parade. It’s neither, and yet it’s both, and more. It’s an elegy to both the parade (and all it stands for as a human celebration) and the meaning of a photograph (and all that stands for as a human icon). Not the actual thing, nor a particularly satisfying record of the thing, and yet it addresses and transcends both.
Documentary v Recollection Here’s the difference. Obviously this is not the kind of parade picture you’d expect to see in next day’s local newspaper. What it is is the picture you see in your memory, long after the event. It doesn’t depict the parade; it depicts the feeling and the memory of watching a parade go by. So it’s really a recollection … of parades and celebrations, of small town life, of certain indelible prosaic markers in your own history (the period car, the ordinary people with names no longer recalled, even the self-important small dog present at every local event). It captures and recalls some of the fragments that shape memory, and the uncertainty of memory too.
A picture can’t do these things – can’t transport every viewer to a different place and a different personal moment – if it is explicit. Thus this is a wonderfully apt use of a carefully judged absence of fidelity. It would be diminished, and rendered unconvincing, if it were a conventional high-fidelity documentary photograph. The photograph would no longer have that rare quality that distinguishes it – the ability to be equally relevant and evocative to every viewer, pretty much regardless of personal history and experience.
Skill Disguised You have also sneaked in some clever technical skill, behind your mask of apparent negligence. One in particular is the composition, which makes beautiful use via perspective of leading lines that pass obliquely through the picture into nothing, just as do the marchers themselves.
Whatever Next? On an intellectual level the picture is ripe with allegory, where the marchers represent the march of human life itself, and of civilisations with their brief shining moment in the sun, banners waving and drums beating, and then their inevitable passing.
Enough But now I go too far with this fanciful allegory stuff! Enough is to recognize and appreciate the difference between a parade, a picture of a parade, and an object that celebrates the meaning of both. And that’s what this is. Thank you.
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