It is not the image that elicited the response. The response was to Oscar's question. Without that gentle challenge the response would have consisted (my guess) of perhaps two or three replies of the +1 variety.
It's one of the attractions to me of LuLa that there exists a readership that is interested enough to comment on photographs, and to make some too. Comment is always a tricky thing in which to engage, because even despite perhaps not personally having met fellow scribes, one feels them to be friends, and the last thing one desires is to distance them and offend them in any way.
It rapidy becomes obvious, in any grouping, that there are those who say yes to everything and those who say no, and those who remain mute. If you look at the numbers for LuLa then it's difficult to escape the view that the majority looks, perhaps reads and then just moves on to something else. The result is that those who communicate get to understand one another quite well, and if they also post images, their visual sense is subconsciously registered, stored and used as barometer of the value of their contributions. Better yet, if they also display a website address, a far more focussed sense of what they are about can be had which, sometimes, appears to be at loggerheads with their LuLa presence.
And what does the above indicate? Just that the more we think we understand someone, the less, in fact, we realise that we do, because I believe that we are all such a mess of contradictions that we fail really to know who the hell we are ourselves. Maybe we are everybody and anything and everything, as well as nobody at all.
Slobodan refers to the most brief "artist's statement": mine is even more brief than the quoted one, and so I'm sorry (no, I'm not!), but I trump that!
On the more serious aspect of his post, though, on the theoretical qualities of colour etc. my feeling is - crap! That is all posturing after the event. It's the equivalent of selling snake oil to the willing; the difference between he who would intellectualise everything and he who just gets up off his ass and does it well anyway: Vincent, anyone? The cavemen? You can read every book on theoretical art and the mechanics of vision ever published and if you couldn't create art before, you will still be unable when your beard has got you into Zee Zee Tops. It's inborn, as is the feeling, the understanding of what you see which is, back to the same thing, what you are.
Oscar enjoys musical equivalents: I have music on almost all day long, enjoy it tremendously and remember so many different phases of it in popular culture, but none of that lets me play a single instrument (yes, I have tried) or even sing a single song. The visual arts are no different: you have it or you do not; if you have it nobody needs tell you what it is, and the most they can do for you is show you the mechanics as best they can, provide you with the knowledge of the tools, not of what you will use them to accomplish or how. In fact, I always feel that the less anyone else tries to influence you as a youth, the better off you are for it. When you are young, impressionable and open you find your own thing where it's reflected within the work of others, it helps you crystalise your ideas a little bit. Take Leiter: I met his world in around '59 in the pages of Popular Photography Annual (or perhaps the Color one; they were separate publications) and he thrilled me. I never forgot his pictures of the model through the windows of the carriage. But after that annual, he vanished from my sight. I sometimes wondered what became of him, and the amazing thing is this: in my late seventies I discovered his new book, published just after he died. Suddenly, he became the gallerist's darling (a gallery helped get the last book produced) and I saw again the work that had moved me so long ago. Today, a local, hick-town version is probably what I do myself. So, do I feel I want to be a Leiter clone? No, but I do accept that he was the first photographer to let me see what I truly liked, apart from fashion. It was not ever on my list of options in my work, but today, it is, and that gives me something to develop despite the fact that I have no Soames of my own; no New York city with its teaming life. (Ask Russ how that feels!) But hey, what did I discover: he was far from alone or a pioneer; there was an entire school of New York photographers shooting different yet similar versions of street back in the 40s and 50s. Mostly they used black/white, but not always. I recently bought the Louis Faurer book (Steidl) hoping to find his beautiful fashion work, but it was only his street photography. Only, but very good, and so similar to Leiter's. There is even a couple of pictures of Robert Frnk, just for good measure. I never thought of Frank as a wearer of pinstripe suits, but there you are. In one, he reminds me of Bob Dylan.
So yeah, discussion about one image is often discusion about all images, which is quite enjoyable when you are not actually making any at the time.
Which is probably the point of the above.
;-)