Exif data: NIKON D300, Focal Length: 105 mm, Aperture: f/4, Exposure: 1/640 sec, ISO Speed: 200, Flash: Not Fired
14/12/2009 at 21:40
Categories: [people] [towns]
33 comments
Work, the doing of manual labor to accomplish something tangible, something that can be held in the hand and inspected or something you can step back from and survey has fascinated me from the time I was a young child.
There are many things I find enjoyable that don’t involve working with my hands, but I have always had a feeling of satisfaction when I’ve been involved in a task and seen the finished product.
Through the years I’ve had the privilege of being involved in a wide spectrum of tasks. I won’t begin to name them, but I think perhaps it’s one of the reasons I find structures so interesting and they’re my favorite subjects to photograph.
[Michele] wrote something recently that got me thinking about why structures fascinate me. I’m guessing it’s because I’ve been involved in every aspect of the building process except the roof.
I’ve photographed people working on the street like this man and only posted a few shots. My thinking after the fact was, “So what? It’s a guy on the street working. Who hasn’t seen that?” This guy is a bit different though. For one thing he’s working alone; something I rarely see.
Typically, I see one guy working and four guys standing around. Also, I normally know exactly what they’re doing, but I never figured out for certain what this guy was trying to accomplish. He was rubbing the structure with his bare hand, actually his fingertips. It seemed to me he was going over every inch and I stood watching him, wondering.
Just an educated guess, but I finally concluded he was rubbing some kind of compound on cracks in the stucco, but I couldn’t confirm it because I never saw him get any compound. There would have to be a container of some sort. I just don’t know.
Another thing about this image is it has graffiti. It’s the first time I’ve seen graffiti in this town:-)
The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say, 'There is the surface. Now think, or rather feel, intuit. What is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks that way'. Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy. The very muteness of what is, hypothetically, comprehensible in photographs is what constitutes their attraction and provocativeness.
- Susan Sontag
