Salon day. Theme for the designated period: “transcendance.”
Before I picked a shot for submission (and frankly, nothing from recent shooting came readily to mind until the last hour or so), my mind catalogued the likely shots to be seen — religious iconography, motion-blur ghosting, the brilliant light of inspiration. Got it all in spades, once I had made my shot, sent it off, and then surveyed the field. Hosannah! The only thing I didn’t see, that I had expected, was a rogue Ansel Adams knockoff. Maybe next time.
Expected images — to confirm and conform — are the bane of the single-shot salon, I suspect. It’s hard not to end up shooting along one or two predictable axes: either the picturesque or the ironic (and in the latter, I’d include the “surreal”). At this point in history, when even the smallest of children are bombarded with sophisticated imagery, it’s hard to imagine any great value in any single image. It takes a host of them if you really are hoping to make anything but a very well-worn point.