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Phil Douglis | all galleries >> Galleries >> Gallery Forty-Nine: Creating an echo with rhythm and pattern > Library, Singapore, 2007
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30-AUG-2007

Library, Singapore, 2007

When heavy rains disrupted our pbase shoot-around in Singapore, we headed for cover in the city’s stylish library. We found one room, probably a lounge or display area, that had only one occupant – a man working on his laptop at the very end of a long row of upholstered stools. By taking the seat at the far end of the room, he makes the image work as a series of rhythmically repeating shapes. Three major patterns emerge, the interlocking boards of the polished bare floor, the round stools, softly illuminated by window light, and the row of wet windows itself. All three patterns sweep the eye down to the man at the very end of the room. If he were any further from us, he would be out that door, which gives the exit sign over it an extra touch of meaning. He leans over his laptop, unaware of the power of the patterns that lead our eyes to him. His relatively small size also creates a scale incongruity – all of those empty stools, with just one of them in use.

Leica V-Lux 1
1/25s f/3.6 at 23.4mm iso100 full exif

other sizes: small medium large original auto
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Phil Douglis15-Oct-2007 22:27
Thanks, Tim, for picking up on that "no laptops" icon on the sign behind him. I never noticed it. Such is the nature of institutions -- it was indeed ironic that he does not really belong in this room, and we were told, just after I made this picture, not to make photographs in the library. Laptops and cameras can be tools of enlightenment, just as a library. Yet neither are permitted in this one. As you say, the play of light in this image is a perfect metaphor for enlightenment.
Tim May15-Oct-2007 18:32
Several thoughts come to me from this image - one is that, as a library devotee, people come to libraries to seek the light of knowledge - light so infuses this image that it becomes a metaphor for knowledge. Yet, he is focusing on his computer - the new way to seek knowledge. And there is a double irony here, for me, being there, one that right after this image we were told not to make pictures in the library, and this man seems to be sitting under a sign that says not to use computers.
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