Every Thursday, as part of my personal “enriched environment” initiative, I post a piece of art, usually from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which recently released online some 400,000 high-resolution images of its collection. All artwork will show a sun (or sunlight) somewhere.
I won’t name the piece or the artist, but instead invite you to study the art and post a comment addressing one or more of these questions:
- What is going on in this picture?
- What do you see that makes you say that?
- What more can you find?
If you have another idea, run with it.
Special Update! The New York Times website does this same exercise every Monday with a news photo that is uncaptioned and contains no text (click!). The Times asks viewers the same three questions:
- What is going on in this picture?
- What do you see that makes you say that?
- What more can you find?
However, at the end of the week, the Times posts the background information on the picture. So, I’ve decided to do the same. I’ll still post an unlabeled piece of art on Thursday. But return on Sunday (for the Sunny Sundays post!) and you’ll find an update on the artwork here.
Note: To embiggen the image, click on it!
Runner in the City
Artist: El Lissitzky (Russian, Pochinok 1890–1941 Moscow)
Date: ca. 1926
Medium: Gelatin silver print
Is this man hurdling or hurrying or hurtling through Times Square?
Did you post this before the horrible incident this week in Times Square, where a drug-deranged former US soldier drove his car on a crowded sidewalk, killing one person and wounding dozens of others? WIth that incident in mind, I find that the vertical white lines are like prison bars and the man jumping over the hurdle is not really going to escape, he just thinks he’s going to win the race, and that his flight over the hurdle gives a sense of flight and freedom that doesn’t really exist.
Just checking in to note that the sun is off to the right, and this looks like it’s not a flat photograph but 3-D somehow. Also, some of the background scenery is doubled. And the white race track lines at the bottom are perpendicular to the vertical white lines. The man who is jumping over the hurdle seems crazed, perhaps because of the surroundings.