Raining Under Manhattan Bridgeby
instepsComment: Hi Henry,
Nice to see this essay and the website where you've posted it. I plan on spending some time there poking around your earlier essays. It gives me a greater sense of who
Insteps is. FWIW... Your challenge images are consistently among my highest scores.
Although I really lack confidence in my ability to critique an essay, (I am bit more comfortable with individual shots), I'll give this a shot.
The tile and cover photo caught my interest right away and I wasn't disappointed. I was also impressed with the imagery of your written text, it certainly amplified the effect of the images and worked to create a coherence that the images alone might not have created. I guess that's what essays are all about. And I don't mean to lessen the impact of the individual or set of photos, which would stand well alone, but the context is fascinating and onto something I had a clue about.
I really love the first image with a sense of busy-ness, congestion and dank environment. It is so well composed to take so many elements and present a sense of place and its separate but connected nature to the city. The second image really brings home the place you are exploring - growing up as a privileged white kid in southern California suburbs, it's hard to imagine anyone living like this. Also standing out to me is the powerful diptych of two women's faces (one on the poster and the one behind her umbrella). The two pigeons work well in sequence here, too.
The bright red fire escape contrasting with the drab grey of the day and the building works for me too... it brings my attention to the other similar splashes of color that you have sprinkled throughout. Perhaps my favorite image is the reflection of the bridge in a rain puddle, which you've also used to great effect in the banner link to the essay on your website.
In the end, I find this to be highly engaging and effective in providing context and a sense of place. It really is a complete work, despite my comments about individual images. It is what I would expect a well-crafted photo essay to be... a gestalt set of images (or images and text) that is "greater than the sum of its parts". [As an aside, I recently
read on Wikipedia that the original quote from Gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka, "The whole is other than the sum of the parts" is often incorrectly translated as "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts"]
Thanks for sharing your work!
Message edited by author 2016-01-03 21:25:10. 
Photographer found comment helpful.
