Picture of the Month — Slow Club by NYIP Graduate Lou Legazpy

This month, NYIP Associate Dean Jerry Rice has written the Photo of the Month Review. Jerry's keen eye can help readers decipher any type of photograph. A lifelong lover of fine photography, when Jerry talks about photographs, everyone at NYIP listens. We know you'll enjoy Jerry's observations on this month's photograph.

At NYIP we teach our students a simple Three-Step Method for setting up every photograph they shoot:

• Step 1. Know your subject.
• Step 2. Focus attention on your subject.
• Step 3. Simplify.

This simple Three-Step Method is the secret of every successful photograph ever taken. We teach our students to consider these three steps every time they look into the viewfinder or LCD panel. To consider them before they press the shutter button.

When our students mail in their photographs for analysis by their instructor, the instructor starts by commenting on what we call the three Guidelines. Of course, the instructor analyzes other elements of the picture too — focus, exposure, filters, etc. But the key to every good photo — and the essential element of every great photo — is adherence to these three Guidelines.

How do they work? How can you apply them? It's beyond the scope of this Web site to teach you every nuance, but you will get an inkling from the Photo of the Month Analysis that follows.

Slow Club

Photo by NYIP Graduate Lou Legazpyng

In the creative arts there exist innumerable styles, genre, moods, attributes, characteristics, etc., not the least of which is the use of irony. If I recall through the cloudy haze of memory, a high school English teacher once told our class that irony must always contain an element of truth. Hyperbole may be nothing more than frivolous exaggerated humor, and outright lying is destructive. But irony must have its roots in truth.

In Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in the famous funeral oration Mark Antony says that Brutus says that Caesar was ambitious. To which Antony adds that Brutus is an honorable man as are all the other conspirators. But, of course what Antony really means is that all the conspirators are liars and traitors. The irony lies in what Antony says but not what he truly feels. And the element of truth? Of course, Brutus and the others are honorable men by anyone's standards. Or so they seem on the surface.

NYIP Graduate Lou Legazpy of Staten Island, NY, has created a marvelous example of the use of irony in his Picture of the Month. By the way, Legazpy won an NYIP Merit Award with a different photograph

The photograph shows a sign over the café — the Slow Club, a mystifying term. Is the business slow? Is the service slow? We simply cannot determine what i slow just by looking at the photograph. But there are contradictory elements here. The three men on the left seem to be moving not at a slow pace but a rather rapid one. Possibly, this is the result of the use of a slow shutter speed to convey rapid motion; perhaps the effect was deliberately done and not merely the result of the camera's technical abilities. Obviously, if we saw the whole sign on the right side of the image it would read Espresso — Italian for Express (fast, speedy, rapid, etc.) The irony continues: Slow Club, fast moving people, the word Espress, and, of course, the three empty folding chairs. One might view the chairs as signs of slow business or signs of hasty and speedy retreat.

It is important that mature audiences be given a choice; ambiguity contributes to the irony. Each viewer of Legazpy's photograph will find his own interpretation. That, I suppose, is the ambiguous nature of irony.

The photographs of the great Cartier-Bresson are full of ambiguity, full of irony. But they never depart from reality. Is Van Gogh's "Starry, Starry Night" any less powerful because it does not have the clarity of a Dutch genre painting? What does Edvard Munch's " The Scream" really mean? And Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake" is tougher sledding than Cooper's "The Last of the Mohicans". But therein lies the challenge.

Mature audiences deserve the right to enjoy creative works at some level of experience beyond "Hansel and Gretel" or "Superman". If irony is a useful tool in raising the intellectual content, more power to the ironic statement!

The photographer, Lou Legazpy, when making this Picture of the Month, has carefully observed the three well known NYIP Guidelines: strong subject matter, focusing attention on the subject, and ultimately simplifying the picture by eliminating all that is unnecessary but retaining all that is important.

Strong subject matter — a café or club, common throughout much of the world, yet a focal point for social gathering, for discussions (heated but friendly), for bonhomie and good fellowship.

Focusing attention on the subject — relatively even divisions of space with each division having its separate and distinct function.. Three men in a hurry on the left, three vacated chairs to the right, the name of the club at the top, and window displaying merchandise below the sign, all neatly compartmentalized.

Simplifying the photograph — there are really only two sections, the people and the building and its components. A very uncomplicated picture, but an ironic one indeed.