By ordinary standards, this is a poor photograph. Most of it is blurred and half the image is taken up by an uninteresting tabletop. Ordinary standards don’t interest me.
What caught my attention about this photo? The lights. Because most of this image is blurred, those lights are not well located in the 3D space of the room. Rather they appear to be bright patches on the surface of the photo. They betray that fact that his photo IS an image on a plane, not a direct glimpse into the room.
That fact that most of the image is blurry doesn’t tells us that this is a photo. Or rather, it does so, but in a way that’s more intellectual, something we infer, than perceptual. The receding lines of the ceiling and of that boring tabletop are strong perceptual depth cues, as are the relative sizes of things, especially the man standing back in the corner right of center. Those cues define a 3D space. But it is hard to situate those lights in that space. We know where they are intellectually, but we can’t see them perceptually. As I’ve already said, perceptually they are bright patches on the surface. The image is thus in conflict with itself.
That conflict both says, “I’m a photo,” and invites us to attend to color and composition. Those I like. The fact that a bit over half the image is taken up by that tabletop produces contrasting visual materials that I find interesting. On the one hand we have the faux grain pattern that dissolves toward the center of the image. That contrasts with the well-articulated geometry of the room that is realized in different colors.
Almost all of these effects, except for the color itself, remain, and are perhaps slightly enhanced, in the black and white version below.
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