I Don't Know Either

I went through my image catalog while sitting in a coffee shop this evening. I have thousands of digital captures (or digital negatives, if you will) to choose from, but for some reason this one jumped out at me. Mind you, it wasn't a maybe I can get something out of this one type of situation. This photo was the One (for this evening, at any rate). But why?

Objectively speaking, it is a terrible photograph. It's clearly out of focus, if ever such a sentence could be taken seriously. It lacks any sense of textural detail. There's no subject or narrative to speak of except maybe that it's snowing outside. The scene is tilted at a weird angle, but not tilted so much as to create a dynamic tension or present a novel perspective. All the same, I like it. I like it a lot. I tried cropping it a few different ways, but even the slightest adjustment ruined what I'm going to boldly label a composition and reduced the image to a poorly framed, out of focus photograph of nothing much. Which it may well be, but I like it.

So what's to like about this one? I don't know exactly. Maybe I like that it presents itself unambiguously as a mechanical reproduction—and a poor one at that—but you still get the feeling like you could step inside of it and walk around. Of course, if you did that, you'd become all blurry and skewed too.

Youth Brigade - Where Are All The Old Man Bars