Reflections in a Mud Puddle

This morning I found myself driving through a pre-dawn fog. Traffic was light leaving the city and heading north, NPR was on, but I wasn't listening. Resting on the passenger seat was a camera and I started thinking about how things, images, photographs, are defined, how the meaning is ascribed to it by whatever response it elicits from the viewer. Which is as it should be. Meaning should come all on its own.

Aesthetic and form are what they are, regardless of intention. But then I thought of the New Leipzig School of painting, a painstaking method blending the figurative with the narrative on a usually mute-hued canvas. Haven't they taken aesthetic and form and redefined them? Perhaps. Either way, I thought that I would try and apply the techniques of the NLS to photography. Or, the reworked print since the image included here differs vastly from the original photograph and negative.