Final Project Photos and Annotation: Shot 6

Love

Personally, this is my favourite shot, because it has sooo much to offer and leaves room for so many different interpretations and ways of looking at it.

Taken from an outside point of view, it features a couple in a coffee shop, a public space. Nevertheless, they seem to have a really intimate moment, considering that the woman’s head is lying on the man’s shoulder. Thus, physically they couldn’t be much closer.

However, the fact that both of them are staring at their phones and seem to forget about the other one, takes them hundreds of miles away from each other.

It seems like even love can’t resist against the power and the influence that phones have on us.

Why did I choose to present a couple that’s already a bit older? Why didn’t I just take pictures of a couple my age. The thing is, that the aim of this whole photographic essay is to show different things, have individual pictures that each say something different on their own, but still connect and have the same message as the others.

Thus, I wanted to show that it is an issue that doesn’t only involve young people and the ‘generation Z’, we live in a world where hyper-connectivity has become so important that it doesn’t only concern teenagers anymore, it is an issue that all age classes are infected with. As mentioned before, this meaning is also conveyed in the 'Family' shot, nevertheless, the meaning is still slightly different, because in contrast to this one, the mother-daughter relationship clearly features both sides, whereas in this one, the focus is definitely just on the older generation. 

Talking about composition, this shot has so much to offer as well. Because we look at the scenario from an outside point of view, we can see the reflection in the window, the light stripes going through the man’s face, the windows of the reflected building, etc…

All these things create new meanings and help different viewers to read the photograph differently, according to their own experiences. The possibilities that this shot has to offer in terms of 'reading it' are endless and of course they depend on the person that looks at the picture.