Jim Tonne

More from my archives. Pleasant lass sitting on a board in a barn. Simple pose, pretty, warm day.

travelwp Loc: New Jersey

I like this photo.

Timmers Loc: San Antonio Texas.

Nicely done image. The wood surface appears as smooth and sensual as the woman's skin. The washed out background works much like the white drop out in a studio setting. An excellent decision to make as it draws the attention to the subject. Again, the wooden surfaces work well to conveys the sensuality of location and the light you have handled extremely well. A super country scene that evokes the old saying, 'gentle on the mind'. I think we all could enjoy more rural scenes like this on calendars.

jaymatt Loc: Alexandria, Indiana

Fotoartist Loc: Detroit, Michigan

I would crop. You don't need anything to the right of her foot or underneath the lasses ass. And I'd crop off the light trap on the lower left. Beautiful pic.

jaymatt Loc: Alexandria, Indiana

I wouldn’t crop because the photo is more than the girl--it’s the complete mood scene, which I think cropping would eliminate.

Timmers Loc: San Antonio Texas.

I don't think you fully understand the influences that are behind what you have here, the influences that are the evocative structure that you are working with. I'm not being snotty, many of us are modern and yet don't understand how we are influenced by the world of modern art. When I first saw your photograph I had this impression float across my mind, "A mono chrome Piet Mondrian!" And one wonders if the photographer was exposed to the art movement De Stijl or perhaps van Doesburg*.

Any way, your composition is well seen both on an intellectual and emotive level. That corner square of light to the left is as critical to the image as the figure in the image. The title also works as part of the work. It is in the manner of the styling from the period of time that WW I occurred.

I believe that you have married the world of abstraction and that of pin up. It is a vary smart work.

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet_Mondrian

Timmers Loc: San Antonio Texas.

I don't normally venture into this sort of analysis but here goes. You could move this into the realms of a master work (yea, something to put up on your wall, even sell in a gallery, it can be that good. If you would extend the right side of the work the composition would come alive.

How much of an expansion you would ask? Employ a Fibonacci number formulation*.
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_number

The expansion would expand the right opening square into a rectangle and the left square remains a square. The two trees that are dissolving in the background would have their barn frames shifted to much greater strength.

This sense of dualism would be repeated through out the work. The sunlight coming through the space at the rear of the girls butt is repeated with the light void from the framing for her rear leg's position. This duality is repeated over and over in the work. The window openings looking out on the two trees separated by framing devices of the wall. The two rusty bots in the upper frame.

The use of interior space and exterior space (in most landscape photography we find that most keep two of the formal elements called foreground, middle ground and background while discarding the one. In this work you have achieved the near impossible with your subject. Here the barn wall becomes the middle ground while her intense gaze establishes we the viewer as the foreground with out putting any recognizable foreground. You have formally destroyed the notion of the photograph as reality by requiring the voyeuristic quality of the woman's gaze, and so ours. This entire image has such complexity it is difficult to not engage the intellect of the viewer.

The truly amazing thing about this image is the manner that space is co completely compressed into two areas, the middle ground and the background. The background if out of the zone of information focus reducing the exterior space to a dream like quality. The trees become lie the distant trees of Modiglany or in the landscape elements of Leonardo de Vinci's Mona Lisa, images of pure light without any reality. Yet we return to the woman' eyes, the reality of a living breathing human presence.

It would all be a vary lovely image, easy on the eyes and with out any great merit but for one critical thing. The middle ground and its primary subject of flatting out space. This is the work of artists like George Braque, and the cubists with their flattening out of space into deconstructed perspective. No easy matter in the plastic qualities of a photographic work.

Then you place the nail in the coffin! As George Braque completed his last work, declaring that he was finished with cubism, there was no more place to go, Braque had gone full circle, where he began with his deconstruction of perspective space and had finally returned to the need for perspective he placed a trompe l'oeil** nail at the top of the canvases with a shadow rendered with detail and clarity.

So like Braque you have done the impossible. Were the woman rests and the wall of the barn are rendered flat with the parts becoming separate from, but still parts of the whole. The killer trompe l'oeil in this work is the rusted curve hook resting at the center near dead center of the work. It is real, it is physical, it defiantly three dimensional. So abstraction has come back to the three dimensional reality of photography. Quite an accomplishment sir!

** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trompe-l%27%C5%93il

Fotoartist Loc: Detroit, Michigan

If the OP hopefully doesn't mind I have copied and messed with his shot for illustrative purposes because of an important point here.

The reference to Mondrian is not lost on me. As an artist, I appreciate the total composition of the original. But, as a photographer, I appreciate the cropped version of the lass. I think there are two good shots here. In fact as I now look at the cropped version I begin to see triangle light traps that are just as interesting as the rectangles cropped out. And were not noticeable before.

olBadger

Excellent!

NoSocks Loc: quonochontaug, rhode island

amen.

NoSocks Loc: quonochontaug, rhode island

damn. i quoted the wrong comment. I meant to quote from the "no crop" argument.