Reading photographs: The geometry of a photo

The emotion of this photo is immediate: Green runs arms outstretched, Creighton bellows defiance, and Oxford's supporters rise as one to acclaim the unlikely. But the photographer's decision to keep the players and the pitch to the bottom third of his photo leaves a geometry to this photo: a plane provides the meeting point for three vectors.

Scattered over the pitch, York defenders have collapsed, defeated, sunk into the background. Mark Creighton has just scored the winning goal late in the game, and leads a line of Oxford players. Danny Bulman and Matt Green follow their own lines to this point. There seems an implicit knowledge of where they are heading, they meet at a point on the plane in front of them. That plane rises in front of them, dwarfing them: the supporters rising from their seats, arms aloft, mouths open mirroring the roar of Creighton.

A plane can be unlimited in its extension: this picture doesn't show whether or where it stops. Vectors, however, meet at a point. The players are individual representatives on the pitch of this bank of supporters, a plane which might continue indefinitely: the discrete part and the whole. In this picture we see the size of the players dwarfed by the supporters, but emotionally there is a mirroring; and geometrically, a union.

[The above photo is © Lewis Outing LRPS CPAGB, and reproduced here with his kind permission. See more of his photography here: http://www.mainlyfax.fotopic.net]