James

We are here at the boundary between photography and drawing. I still have a hard time believing this is a picture and not made with a pencil. Ben Heine succeeds once again (I realized that his picture "Octet" was not a drawing as well) at post-processing the picture in such a way that we cannot tell the difference. As such, this already deserves high praise.

I found the picture itself very interesting. The checkered tiles take an amazing amount of space that hypnotizes the watcher. It is only after a while that we can explore the rest of the picture and look at the subjects, which is nicely positioned between the tiles and the vague exterior. The right of the picture is quite messy but this adds to the general feeling of "business". As usual, we can spend countless moments exploring the picture and finding interesting details. For instance, the worn-out tiles have remained perplexing to me, until I wandered through the comments and found out what they were.

Finally, I think that flipping the picture horizontally was a very clever idea, since it made the name immediately readable (not to mention that this adds to the sentiment of complexity that emanates from this picture since we don't know what's inside and outside anymore).