When I first saw this on a phone, I nearly dismissed it.
Blown up on a better, larger screen, the subdued palette is gorgeous, and there’s a lot of substance to decode in the periphery.
Yes, the simple fact that so much photography being done today is most often seen on phone-friendly sites like Instagram has to be having an impact, and not just on rookie amateurs like me.
Both the subdued palette and the “substance” requiring decoding are very conscious choices that fly in the face of the limitations of those tiny screens. The ubiquity of photos using vast areas of black negative space to frame some highlighted zone is both very attractive to me and annoying at the same time, so often I try to include “artifacts” of the real in those negative spaces as a kind of resistance as well as an invitation.
Thank you, Les, for noticing!
Smoke and Mirrors 
When I first saw this on a phone, I nearly dismissed it.
Blown up on a better, larger screen, the subdued palette is gorgeous, and there’s a lot of substance to decode in the periphery.
Yes, the simple fact that so much photography being done today is most often seen on phone-friendly sites like Instagram has to be having an impact, and not just on rookie amateurs like me.
Both the subdued palette and the “substance” requiring decoding are very conscious choices that fly in the face of the limitations of those tiny screens. The ubiquity of photos using vast areas of black negative space to frame some highlighted zone is both very attractive to me and annoying at the same time, so often I try to include “artifacts” of the real in those negative spaces as a kind of resistance as well as an invitation.
Thank you, Les, for noticing!