I know. There’s a lot of wall.
If your first thought was that I should crop some of it away, I can see why. The man is over on the right, almost everything seems to happen around him, and the left side looks rather underemployed. But every time I look at this photograph, I want to keep that space.
He’s lighting a cigarette. His head drops towards his hands, his arms close around the gesture, and for a moment there’s this little knot of concentration. That’s where I look first. He doesn’t need to be in the middle to hold my attention. The face and hands are already doing quite enough.
The thirds grid helps, up to a point. The man sits around the right vertical; the bottle and ashtray are closer to the left one. Nothing lines up with mathematical precision. Fine by me. I use the grid to see the distribution more clearly, and I get suspicious when it starts being offered as proof that a photograph works. Plenty of dull photographs obey the rules impeccably.
What matters more here, I think, is the triangle. One corner is down by the ashtray and bottle, another is up at the mask, and the third is towards the lower right, at the outer limit of the man’s body. It’s a broad shape that gathers much of the action into one area. The diagonal from the ashtray to the mask runs through the man’s head; the base returns across the lower part of the scene. His face sits within that arrangement. It isn’t one of the three corners.
The bottle does a fair bit of work, too. It’s dark, quite solid, easy to pick out against the wall. With the ashtray, it gives my eye somewhere to go on the left before returning to the hands. Take those objects away and the balance would be much harder to hold. A small thing can carry a surprising amount of weight in a photograph.
And then there’s the wall. Still there, taking up all that room.
For me, that emptiness gives him a certain solitude. There’s space beside him that nobody fills, while he’s absorbed in this very small task. I’m talking about how the picture feels. I have no idea whether he felt lonely. He may have been perfectly happy and mildly annoyed with his lighter. Photographers are very good at finding existential crises in people who just want a smoke.
A closer crop would give us more of the man and less of that odd distance around him. It might make a stronger immediate impression. I’d miss the slower part: looking at him, wandering across the table, feeling how much room is left over.
The mask complicates things nicely. I notice his mouth almost hidden by his hands, then that other mouth wide open above him. It’s a ridiculous little pairing. He’s busy with his cigarette; the figure behind him seems to be taking the whole business very badly.
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