Light is everything
Photographs are not just pictures of things. They are pictures of light and shapes, how they interact and the mood they create. Every day is different, so every photograph is different, even if the subject is the same.
The important thing is not simply what things are, but also how they look. What things are is a very literal interpretation of the world which has some limited descriptive or evidentiary value, but it carries no emotional weight, it prompts no memories or recollections, does not have any mood-altering capability and does not provide any simple graphical satisfaction.
The literal content in a photograph is only one of its layers. I would suggest there are as many as three, maybe four:
The Literal Layer: what the photograph is of
The Emotional Layer: how it makes you feel
The Graphical Layer: the satisfaction it offers to the eyes as a set of shapes and lines, weights and balances
The enigmatic layer: a sense of mystery, further questions, the start of a train of thought, not the end
I Have photographed this location many times. The objects, the ‘literal’ component, never change. But the light, my compositions, the mood are changing all the time.
On this day, the most important thing for me was the silvery brilliance of the light, the way it shone through the glass and bounced up to light a patch of the slatted roof, and the contrast it created with the lines and shapes and tones.
In a literal sense, it really doesn’t have a whole lot of meaning. It’s an oblique view of part of a shelter on a pier. But I do think it’s strong in a graphical and emotional sense, which is what often drives me in photography far more than just literal depictions.