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markwileyComment by ubique: You said in a follow-up post that your essay was "woefully short on thoughts". But you were wrong because it certainly isn't.
If I were the editor of a photo magazine and this came across my desk my immediate thought would have been "Comfortably Numb", and I'd have given that title and these pictures to my best scribe and said to give me 500 words on that theme to do justice to these pictures, and keep your sentences short (not like this one).
I'd have said to the writer, "You are one of hundreds, of thousands, serving your daily sentence on mass commuter transit, and yet you are alone. You are wrapped in an invisible cloak, and insulated from emotion, from expression, from any apparent animating influence at all. You are insulated
even from yourself." It's a very sci-fi concept, the suppression, the spiritual abdication, of any visible sense of self as a means of coping with distopia.
Some words already written on the subject by Pink Floyd:
"There is no pain, you are receding
A distant ship smoke on the horizon
You are only coming through in waves
Your lips move but I can't hear what you're saying
...
This is not how I am
I have become comfortably numb"
So, enough of that stuff: the essay is coherent and consistent and
anything but woefully short on thoughts.
But what of the photographs? They are perfect technically and look like film photography, when different things mattered. By that I mean they are technically accomplished without shouting about it, which is the opposite of much contemporary digital photography. In your pictures the "Wow" is whispered, and all the better and more profound for that restraint.
And there's not a clunker among them either; not one that would know the cruel cut of my editor's red wax pencil. I tried, went three times through: could not make a single deletion. Every single image contains its own essay. To continue the musical allusion, it's like a great album where every track is good both alone and as an essential brick in the wall, too. It's astounding consistency; either you had thousands to choose from, or you're bloody supernatural.
Mark, I loved the pictures, loved the essay, and loved the time as a fantasy editor that you gave me.
Thank you.
Message edited by author 2015-03-04 06:23:52. 
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