Victoria Olsen

 Bruce Davidson, Central Park, 1992.The pastoral is an underappreciated genre.  I love this photograph by Bruce Davidson, one of a series he made of Central Park.  In text and image the pastoral relies on harmony and balance.  Here the reflecting lake provides a natural reason for that balance.  It fills the center of the composition and it creates symmetry through mirroring, particularly of the bridge.  Look at the reflected buildings: the line of symmetry divides the photograph roughly in half horizontally.  But in the meantime there is that overarching tree in the foreground...and those two towers interrupting the horizon in the background.  The textures are artful too, combining delicate foliage, glassy surface, and the solid constructions that signal the city is near.  And then there is the play of light and dark that culminates in the dark tree at one pole and the pale bridge on the other.

Balance, then, is key, especially here in this idyll in the center of a busy city.  You can envision a movie camera pulling back from above, until the park is a tiny dot in the middle of an abstract canvas -- much like the mysterious, dark, still boat adrift in this lake, which is the only hint here of a story.