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 in the picture?
- What does it make you think of?
- What observations can you make?
Note: To embiggen the image, click on it!
Well, I see a bar of what looks like sunlight in the background. The women and man (men>??) seem lit by natural light so maybe there is open sky overhead. They are dressed mostly in white and I cannot tell what they are doing with those three trays in front of them. And also what about the row of color and the ruler at the bottom? How is that related?
The picture is mostly dark. The white robes look ghostly.
!!! You have a THING for BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOGRQPHY , MAN !!!!
The photograph itself seems to be mounted on some kind of black astroturf, and the beige frame around it has threads unravelling. Especially in the corners! Very strange.
I think there are seven women and one man in this picture. The women have their heads draped with their robes. The man is wearing a kind of turban, I think.
I can not figure out what the three women in the center are doing with the flat trays, the metal flattened sticks, the brick-like object on the trays.
The women seems to be squatting on their haunches but the man looks like he is sitting on a low stool, based on what I see about the way they are sitting.
I could be wrong!
The white robes the people are wearing are matched in this shadowy pic by the bar of white sky in the background.
These women seem to be working but at what I cannot tell. I don’t understand the color bar and ruler at the bottom. The glass over the picture seems scratched with white scratch marks that in many cases are doubled. I had to enlarge the photograph to see the double scratch marks.
The humans are “posed” in such a way that you can see all their faces. I don’t think they’d be sitting exactly like that if there was no camera present. Five of the six people in the middle are in more or less a straight line. There’s one person in back of the group. And on either end, the person sitting there is a little bit more forward, more in front. Making, all in all , a kind of crescent.
Like the other commenters, I don’t know what they are doing with those three flat boards, and how it relates to the colored squares at the bottom.
I’d like to know what these woman talk about if they sit together regularly and do whatever work it is that they’re doing. And what is the interaction between them and the man.
*****
In general, things slope up towards the man. He’s sitting higher than everyone else, his head gear is highest, the three wooden trays the women are working with slope up to him, and then there is the ladder in the background, on his side of the picture, suggesting height. Too, the bar of light in the background is more on his side.
Enlarge the photo and it is scratched and blurry.
Don’t enlarge and it’s smooth as a stone washed forever in a brook.