The title was on my lips before I opened it up. One of those irresitable situations where you just cannot not take this picture. The trepidation in the face of the young boy amidst the garishness of city life is priceless.
What grabs me in this image is the knowledge that it is, at least in my understanding, quite common for males in this culture to spend time in a temple. I see here the transition of time. The older man probably spent time as a monk in his youth. It is almost as if he is carrying his past with him.
Guest
11-Aug-2005 23:12
Outstanding image! the contradictions are exquisit (let me put it in this words, ok?).
Both Kal and Phil have already written about this, and they did it great, so I'm not going to repeat the same ;-)
But what really caught my eye of this photograph is the expression of the faces... here, instead of contradictions we find similarities. They both look concerned.. I guess that they are concerned about the present and -especially- about the future. In a quite different way, of course! But the feeling is in their faces and in their body langauge: both of them look tense and worried. The young man and the middle aged man, no matter how different they could be and feel, in the end have to face the unknown path that is in front of them. In the end, we are all the same.
That is what I meant Phil. Everything in this image conveys meaning, including the boys expression of concern, that he walks towards us confronting us with the state of our faith, while the man walks away from the boy, (leaving his faith behind), and all the other tings you say, and all the wile we are crouching, hidig behind the grass verge looking at this and desperately trying not to get noticed.
What Kal is saying (and I value his compliment) is that you are seeing what I am always suggesting to my students. The incongruous relationship. Absolutely everything works here to create the gulf you suggest between the world of the monk and the world of the rest of us. The costumes, attitudes, colors, even positioning are, as you say, "worlds apart." The young monk in the orange robe walks with his alms pot before him, a humble, ancient presence in an alien environment. The man at right, a study in monochrome, takes no notice of him. He carries what appears to be a cigarette in his hand and his body merges into the expensive automobile parked at his side. You allow exactly enough space to flow between these people, a space that will never be bridged or even understood by the two people we see waking within this frame. The man will never turn around, and the monk will never catch up.
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