Hi Doug,
This picture is at first just a boy alone on a dock, head down, resting on the open fence. Maybe he's staring down at the water below. It's not a particularly well executed picture technically, as it seems cluttered. Despite this shortcoming, maybe because one lone boy is a sympathetic figure, we look again.
I started to think how this ordinary humble picture might have become more important to me than my quick first glance assumed. I think this is an example of where the picture encourages us to look further than what is shown. In viewing any non-scientific picture, one can bring to it our own ideas, intelligence, knowledge, imagination and fancy. It does not have to be logical or the true to any facts. Now your picture's reception is no longer just about your intent. To the extent that there's obvious meaning or coded esthetics, we'll get that, of course. There's a wooden dock, a boy is there resting his head on a beam, there's water behind him and so forth. However, we can do much more with our reasoning and imagination. So we we get to have our own say as to the meaning of your photograph!
I like the view through the window which pulls us back from just seeing the boy alone on the dock. Rather we are there from a little distance back, separated by the bars of the window. This separation qualifies our involvement to one of contemplation. The window not only separates us from the picture but, encodes for us the information that you, the photographer, is positioned, back towards us, photographing the scene in front of you and also in front of us.
This extra feeling reminds me of the impressive and grand iconic work of Caspar David Friedrich, who used an actual figure, from behind which we observe the scene he is also contemplating. This figure is called the
Rückenfigur .
Deutsch: Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer
English: The wanderer above the sea of fog
Français : Le Voyageur contemplant une mer de nuages
Caspar David Friedrich 1818. So the painting is more than 70 years old and so "Public Domain" is asserted in Wikipedia, here.
You, looking at the boy, constitutes a kind of virtual
Rückenfigur. This just is my own, perhaps novel, extension of that concept. In the Friedrich's
Wanderer Above the Sea we are confronted by the obviously placed observer. We are pretty
certain he is contemplating what he sees. So we do the same.
Here in your picture we're signaled to consider "What's going on?", "What happened?", "What will happen next?" or "Where are the other children?" Is he staring at the water, tired, bored, lost or abandoned? So your picture becomes more about "consideration" than simple "perception", i.e. merely reading as to what is present.
You may have realized that the boy himself is both the subject and the
Rückenfigur . So now I ask whether the picture needs the window and the idea of your presence intervening? Would it work better with just one
Rückenfigur , just the boy? What would the picture be mean without that window?
So, yes, this is an interesting picture which can be impressive.
Thanks for sharing and bearing with me on my ideas of the picture and what it might mean to us.
Asher
