Still Lifeby
cincolas1Comment by posthumous: Greetings from Critique Club!
I love the interpretation of the challenge. Just think about the possible meanings of this title:
1. An inanimate object, as you mentioned, is "still"
2. The image also suggests someone dying, which makes life "still."
3. Where there's life, there's hope. This image depicts the struggle that EMTs go through when there's still life.
As someone mentioned, the viewer breathes a sigh of relief upon realizing that the child is not real. But the poignancy remains because a photograph is never "real" to the viewer.
There is another sense in which this fulfills the challenge. You took the strategy that some other brave hearts took: freezing motion and calling that stillness. Here we have the frenetic motion of people trying to save a life (even if it is staged) frozen forever. The resulting effect really does feel "still," almost eerily so.
The flash does give this a snapshot feel, but personally I find this only adds to the immediacy of the shot. The composition is great. It conveys the story with as little visual information as possible about the rescuers. The hands doing cpr reach down from above, disembodied. For me they represent hope. They could also represent faith.
I think that the snapshot feel, the exciting composition and the creative interpretation of the challenge all led the DPCers to vote you low. Sad, isn't it?
Photographer found comment helpful.