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Phil Douglis | all galleries >> Galleries >> Gallery Nine: Composition -- putting it together > Waiting in the old city, Marrakesh, Morocco, 2006
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29-DEC-2006

Waiting in the old city, Marrakesh, Morocco, 2006

My subject is a salesman, waiting on a street of shops in a Marrakesh souk. He sits next to a row of closed doors. To tie the man to the doors, I abstract both. I shoot the man in backlight so he becomes a silhouette. I bring the camera as close to the building as I can and use a 300mm telephoto focal length to collapse the line of doors into a rhythmically repeating row of vertical patterns. The eye moves through the rhythmic doors and the building wall until it reaches the man. The overall geometry of the image plays a series of vertical thrusts on the left against a vertically shaded building wall, silhouetted man, and a horizontally divided two color wall in the background at far right. The effect is coherent, compact, and expressive.

Leica V-Lux 1
1/500s f/8.0 at 64.2mm iso100 full exif

other sizes: small medium large original auto
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Phil Douglis17-Jan-2007 18:48
Good eye, Tim -- glad you saw the padlock and its symbolism. To me, it symbolized locking away the past behind us. The "OK" on the wall is an incongruous detail. Those two letters are universally understood to mean acceptance. This man accepts his role as a salesman, passively and patiently awaiting a customer.
Tim May17-Jan-2007 17:04
I find two details here that punctuate the image for me - one is the highlighted padlock which seems to symbolize the locked away feeling I get from this image - the second is the letters OK which are first of all in English which seems a bit odd, and secondly seem to sum up the safety in the locked up quality in the image.
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