Sailing to Byzantium
by rooum

Comment:
This is the most elegant photographic expression of the poem. It beautifully & effortlessly embraces Sailing to Byzantium’s themes of art-nature, mortality-immortality, and impermanence-transformation.

Yours is also the most economical and the most satisfyingly figurative of all the entries, especially as you have addressed the entire poem with your photograph rather than just an easily illustrated phrase wrenched callously out of its context.

Elegantly expressive, economical and figurative? Your photograph is itself a poem! That’s quite an achievement, but it makes you stand out a little awkwardly among so much leadenly literal stuff that appears to have been intended to demonstrate indifference to Yeats’s poem. Or to any poem.

Your beautiful photograph is my top pick. 10. And thank you.



Message edited by author 2014-09-12 06:08:06.

Low-Down
by RKT

Comment:
Nobody does rides better. I've always said that. There, I've said it again.

words
by jmritz

Comment:
Oh, bullshit! This is a preposterous placing. Look, it's true that you do submit some pretty radical stuff that eludes the imaginative reach of the average viewer. But this ought to be accessible to even the most resolutely average viewer.

Let's name names. Blue is Paul, who's a lovely guy and a hugely skilful photographer, but it's not a work of any consequence and certainly not his best stuff; looks like an advertisement for tampons. Red is Sara, about whom I know nothing; it's a stock shot fit for a greeting card intended for a recipient of whom the giver isn't especially fond. Yellow is John, and it's got his customary charm and atmosphere, and a garlic-whiff (or Gallic whiff) of street theatre; far the best of those three. There follows in the top ten (with just one exception) some images distinguished only by their lack of distinction. Original only in their spectacular avoidance of even trace levels of originality.

And then there's this, crouching in third-to-last place.

I simply can't imagine how anyone with any passion for photographs, anyone with even a touch of curiosity or a tiny flicker of imagination, could possibly subscribe to such a topsy-turvy view of the relative merits of the two ends of that spectrum.

This photograph demands attention. It seizes by the short hairs. It obliges the viewer to open it up and read the first chapter, right there in the store. It's a brilliant page-turner and I couldn't put it down. Thank you.

to the river
by whiteroom

Comment:
take me to the river

ambigua
by skewsme

Comment:
Too good. Far, far too good to be seen. I was not able to vote not even view the entries. Then when I saw the ribbons I was deeply grateful for having been elsewhere. Then when I saw this I was restored. Thank you.

P U L L
by insteps

Comment:
Who was that masked man?

still life 1
by daisydavid

Comment:
I guessed who's coming to dinner. Simply irresistible, thank you.

chocolate study
by tnun

Comment:
There are so many faces; so many smiles, frowns and sighs here. It's an enchanted exercise in how far you can push my imagination, and the answer is, 'pretty far, thank you'.

I cannot understand how any even mildly sentient viewer would not prefer this picture over the derivative & formulaic rubbish hanging at the other end of the gallery. I know it's not really a very ambitious challenge theme, but that hardly explains nor excuses such a determined mass absence of curiosity. No man is an island (sayeth Donne), but remarkably many are pretty stony and dense.

the joke's on me
by jmritz

Comment:
It's not the prettiest entry, but it is the most satisfying. All's right with the world. Thank you.

Boots
by Melethia

Comment:
Wickedly expensive old ladies: the best kind.
Those toe caps look spit-shined to me though.
Would have been in my top rank had I reviewed the parade at all. Thank you.