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Phil Douglis | all galleries >> Galleries >> Gallery Sixteen: Story-telling street photography > Oblivious, New York City, New York, 2008
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03-SEP-2008

Oblivious, New York City, New York, 2008

Advertising is often based on incongruous imagery, and so is street photography. I found two sets of incongruous posters on the wall of a building facing a relatively quiet, tree-lined residential street in the heart of Manhattan. The pair of posters closest to the camera uses grim abstractions to promote a cable television series. The next set of posters warns of blindness, using the phrase “You’ll never see it coming.” The two sets of advertisements create random incongruity in themselves, and the man who walks between them here strengthens it. I saw him coming in the distance, and using a 28mm wideangle lens, I waited for his arrival. As I made this image, he looks neither at me nor at the advertisements. His expression and body language seems determinedly oblivious to everything around him, and that makes this image work all the better.

Sigma DP1
1/60s f/5.6 at 16.6mm iso100 full exif

other sizes: small medium large original auto
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