Previous stop: [[Stop Number 2016]] Next stop: [[Stop Number 3679]] ![[2017.jpg]] ## Notes This photograph becomes sparse and emptied out in a way that was very hip in the mid 2010s when I was getting a bachelor's degree in fine art photography. It may still be hip— I'm not sure, I don't really follow contemporary fine art photography any more. The characteristics of this hipness are as follows: - A subject that is perfectly separated from the background. In this case, the sign is perfectly set apart from the background. The foreground subject is tack sharp across its entirety. The bounds of this subject are in razor sharp relief against a rather simple and uniformly out-of-focus background. - The background is simple and uncluttered, with a hazy layering of light and dark regions which is clearly legible yet entirely uninteresting in a way that reaffirms and reasserts the foreground element. - Spatially, these two rather flat elements create some push and pull. The space of the sign almost folds in on itself and collapses, like when you see the outline of a cube and lose track of whether it's representing a convex or concave form. Ultimately, it's just lines, but our eye begs our mind to turn it into something else. - The subject is vague and mysterious— oooo the back of a sign oooo what could it mean? This sign only says "2004" on the back. Yet, it's clearly a stop sign, so ultimately the thing can only be *so* mysterious. That's to say, not that mysterious at all. It's hard to account for this photograph as either a failure or a success. It may be successful in that as I tap out these lines I'm eager to scroll back up to the image in my text editor and check that I didn't overlook some important detail. The success here is that I want to keep looking. The failure is that I find nothing. I remember rather fussily composing this image to ensure a proper balance, a proper separation of the foreground and background. I was nitpicky to ensure that there was not one errant background element which ran away with the coveted attention of my viewer. When this type of image was trendy, I never felt a strong compulsion to make it. I don't think I feel a strong compulsion to make one now, but the unfortunate reality of being exposed to visual forms is that they often regurgitate themselves at certain moments as one plausible option in any given circumstance. (Nick Seitz, September 2, 2025) ## Keywords - [[Backside Of Street Signs]] - [[Mysterious Object]] - [[Out Of Focus Trees]] - [[Stop Sign]]