I saw this on a walk up a steep San Francisco hill last week. I was struck by the minimal color palette against the stucco wall. A better camera would have allowed more depth of field, but I ended up liking the effect.
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Dear Patchwork Quilt,
You have a great eye for finding images. I wonder, seeing this image, and thinking of images like your natural and man-made spirals (snail and hydrant), if your subconscious "saw" the felicitous "mistake" in München before you pressed the button or if that photo was truly serendipitous.
I am glad we are past the dogs of the last post, because though the images stuck with me, I had no idea how to answer the questions that you posed.
To me the obvious narratives, and there were three or four that kept springing to mind, were too obvious. But gussying them up with überwitty comments would still be gussying them up.
The theme that kept coming to me was found art. But a subtext of "dogs playing poker" kept jumping up on this one too. Sorry.
So I can breathe easy again. I just was not sure what to say, and was waiting for someone else to speak first. Which is probably a common enough problem, and frustrating (though only mildly) for you if you really are trying to elicit feedback.
OK, that is truly enough for now. I hope I have not offended you with my comments on your last posting.
Cheers,
Chris
"Dogs playing poker" is perfect, and had me chuckling. You get to the heart of my somewhat rhetorical questions on that post. I'm interested in the psychological, or rather biological need to impose a narrative, or order, where none may exist.
I had just read about a study which shows that people imagine order (in random dots images or through superstition, for example) when they percieve a lack of control.
Loss of Control Leads People to Seek Order Through Superstition, Ritual http://www.utexas.edu/news/2008/10/02/control_superstition/
While I am not suggesting that you, or any other readers, have a particular loss of control, I was curious about how that might apply to what people saw in art, and the difference between representation and non-representational art, and even to the imagined narratives in simple representational art, "Dogs Playing Poker" being an extreme example.
Those images were arranged in cartoon-like panels to create a simple narrative, but that was not the order in which the photos were shot.
As far as the man in Muenchen, (I lost my umlauts over the Atlantic), I did see him out of the corner of my eye. My tiny travel camera (I'm fanatic about traveling with a carry-on only) takes a while to snap after the button is pressed and Herr Hut walked right in. But I did not pre-imagine the shot.
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