Metaphor
Top Step
Photography has a lot in common with poetry. Many poems are easy to understand, easy to take at face value leaving only the slightest tingle of warning that you may have left some meaning behind as you turn the page. Other poems are sadistically obscure; a font for Ph.D. thesis writers and cocktail party bores but opaque to normal mortals. Many poets strike a middle line, gently jerking hooked worms before the reader, enticing them into risking more guesses at the intent, opening windows for the mind to find its own, personal, messages.
The messages one sees in a photograph are always personal, always your own reading. Without footnotes explaining the circumstances, the author’s frame of mind and what lies beyond the frame of the image, the history of all that went before, the location, the weather, the company (present and absent), without all of these and more you cannot know what was in the photographer’s head as he clicked the release or set the Photoshop sliders. You can never be certain of what the photographer was trying to say, but you can be sure of the invitation to ponder and the opportunity to find your own answers.
