The fact that I don’t post a lot of pictures these days shouldn’t suggest that I lost my interest in photography. I am carrying my camera with me all the time and I am constantly looking for opportunities. Somehow, though, I tend to find reasons not to shoot more often than otherwise. Even more often than I want to.
Consider the example from today. I was visiting one of those brand new, clean, white, huge, and empty offices. There was this huge and empty white wall with a small nail in it. They key from the entrance door was hanging on that nail. It looked so surrealistic that I immediately started to look for a way to photograph it.
I spent good twenty minutes thinking about it and still couldn’t find the image. In real life everything looked very cool, but I couldn’t imagine the composed photograph. Basically, I had only two ideas.
The first idea was to photograph as much of white space as possible, having nothing in the frame except for the key and tons of white space. This couldn’t work, since I had to include some reference point that would suggest that it was in fact the wall I was photographing. There was no referenece point around. And without a reference point, the key would appear laying on the surface, not hanging on the wall. A picture like that I can produce at home. But that’s not what I was after.
The second idea was to photograph a part of the office, but having the white wall with the key occupy most of the frame. This way everyone would understand that it was a wall in the office. The emptiness would be even possible to achive. The problem here would be with the key. The key would be too small for anyone to realize what it is, and thus all the surrealism would be lost.
As I already said, I was staring at it for about twenty minutes. After that I had to admit my failure as internal photographer and move on. I guess, sometimes a thousand words is better than a picture…