Wednesday C&C * Wednesday C&C "No Theme" Thread #905 / Revived #125 on 2025 08 20*

Welcome to the Wednesday Comments and Critique (No Theme & No Brand) thread!

We are dedicated to continuing the great tradition of this C&C thread because we are convinced that looking at, and talking about images is vital for better photography.

Our tried and tested concept (almost 17 years and running!) is a weekly "peer-to-peer" photo comments & critique encounter, in which you GIVE and RECEIVE.

The idea is simple: you post a photo or photo-based image that you have made and get critique on it. And in return you give other people your honest but constructive opinion of their images.

Any Theme, Any Camera, Any Style, Any Subject.

We are still figuring out how to create the convenience of threaded view on this new forum.
For now, let us agree that you post an image or essay with a title and short explanation, and that all comments include the image as a quote.
Replies to comments may or may not include quotes.

THREAD GUIDELINES – THE SHORT & SWEET VERSION
• This thread does not care about brands. It’s not about the tool, but the image.
• Post one image or essay that you have made and would like to get comments on.
An entry can either be a single image or a short essay. With an essay we mean not a collection of random images without any connection, seeking C&C on more than one of them. We mean instead a limited number (3 to 10) of connected images that together try to tell a story, create a fuller picture of a situation, event or location, etc.
• Add a clear title to your post to distinguish your entry.
• Look at the other images/essays and give your comments on at least one of those.
• For comments, try to go beyond a simple pat on the back or a short dismissal.
• Do you like an image (or essay) ? Try to explain WHY it appeals to you.
• Negative feedback is OK (we all want to learn), but be polite and constructive. Try to explain why the image (or essay) does not appeal to you and how it might be improved.
• Please stay on topic, i.e. concentrate on the image and the photographic comments, without getting into politics or other distractions. No non-photographic arguments.

The critique you give is vital.
What was your first impression? What catches your eye about an image? Why?
What do you like, and what distracts you? What would you change?

Fiddle with the image in your head - composition, perspective, color balance, exposure.

PLEASE NOTE CLEARLY:
Unless the original poster specifically states (for every individual posting offered for C&C) that they do not want their image(s) to be downloaded, altered or reposted, it is understood that within the context of this thread, other participants are free to download and alter the posted image and repost it in a reply for C&C purposes. That reposted image may remain permanently within the week's thread, or you may remove it after a short period of time if you prefer. The downloaded and altered images are not to be used for any other purposes nor uploaded anywhere else than within the context of the C&C in this thread. No copyright disputes here!

Encourage - it is a scary business putting your work up for other people to judge!

More general feedback is also welcome.
Do you know something about taking the same sort of image that would make matters easier - share your own as an example in your reply.

Have fun, be respectful and let’s stick together!

The UNIVERSE of PANAMARENKO

Quick visit to the MuHKA yesterday. That's the Antwerp Museum of Contemporary Art.
Summer is nearing its end and new exhibitions will start in September so I still needed to visit some shows that will soon close.

One of them is part of the "Panamarenko85" celebrations, marking the 85th birthyear of Panamarenko (deceased 2019), a very colourful figure in the Antwerp (and international) art scene, who had his home and studio in this city (a few miles from my home - currently easily recognizable from the flying saucer that has landed on its roof). Panamarenko is one of our true 20th century greats, who gained worldwide fame with this fantastical creations and theories.

Fascinated from a young age by Jules Verne, physics and science and space travel (as well as Einstein relativity theory, flying saucers, perpetuum mobile, man-powered flight, Icarus, time travel, electromagnetism and numerous other scientific and science fiction subjects), Panamarenko made a name for himself with this playful and highly imaginative creations that were always shrouded in a veil of scientific seriousness. Most of those were cobbled together with waste materials, spit and string in his own backyard. They were always accompanied by elaborate blueprints, notebooks full of calculations and clippings etc.

The exhibition contained a few (lenghty) video fragments of Panamarenko in the 70s and 80s, appearing on television and baffling his interviewers (and both art experts as well as science professors) with his ability to drone on forever in seemingly all serious pseudo-scientific babble, laced with formulas and quotes, with which he almost always managed to sell his incredible ideas as based in hard science. The beauty of it is that he always seemed totally confident and that he seemed to believe what he was saying, although most of it sounds like Doc Brown fever dreams, or conspiracy theories that belong in Area 51. And all of that in his very colourful Antwerp dialect with quite a few tics and speech defects. Truly wonderful example of the idiot savant. You should really find some clips, preferably with English subtitling (although native Flemish speakers don't necessarily understand more of what he is saying than anyone speaking any other language).

Anyway, so I went to see a (small) selection of his works yesterday.
Some of them need an airplane hangar, but in the MuHKA the selection was limited to two rooms.

I was immediately totally sucked into his wonderfully crazy universe and transported back to my own childhood.
Fun personal fact: visiting an exhibition in the Brussels Museum of Beaux Arts that combined René Magritte with Panamarenko, is actually my personal oldest memory of coming into contact with art: a friend of my mom who was interested in my boundless curiosity took me to see that show. This was in the 70s and I must have been a bit younger than 10.

One room contained numerous drawings, blueprints, videos and small experimental installations, as well as a selection of the sources he always kept close at hand (including comic strips and Revell scale models of actual spacecraft).

Here are shots of the second room. This one contained a few of his mid-scale creations.
I think the MuHKA's dark and circular exhibition room was a perfect match for the subject (and my fisheye on the E-M1 the right lens to capture it).
(And yes, I had to lay flat on my back on the gallery floor for that last one.)