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Sound
This is a photograph; there is no audio element in the interaction of myself and this object. In the photograph, a man is driving a car and talking into a radio. It is also clearly from an older movie as it is in black and white, and there are other context clues like the style of the car and clothing.
The lack of sound in the absolute sense allows a sense of timelessness; tenuously, you could say that the lack of sound dates a piece of media as so much of media in the modern era is multi-media, especially short-form videos, but we still have photographs today. However, in the still, the main character is talking into a radio, and driving an old-fashioned car, so we can say there are contextual elements of sound present in the piece. These sounds with date the peace the car would found old fashioned and a radio is an old-fashioned method of communication, but both sounds are also generally steady or continuous sounds - until something goes wrong!
A radio would sound crackly, maybe have interruptions, but this seems to be a communicative radio - so dialogue between one or more characters. The car seems to be alone on the road, and therefore might give off a disproportionate amount of sound in the sound landscape. In that context, the radio and the other voices it provides might be the only other sound or link to other people that appears in this still.
Balance
This is a still where a man is driving an old-fashioned cab, leaning gently to one side to speak into a radio or intercom system. This is a still from a movie, so it was never produced with the intention to be a still, and so it is essentially contextless because it is one of hundreds of thousands of stills that made this moving image item and it has just been taken out of that stream. In terms of production, there's lots of elements of balance - you can think about colour grading and image quality and in terms of balance, but also about the competition of the shot and the lighting especially, which had to be really balanced to get that light and shadow play that's in the image. So, metaphorical balance, but also people on ladders with lights! I'm accessing this from my home office where I am sitting in a chair that is designed to keep me balanced, but also designed to vary my balance enough that I don't sit in one posture for long. I found myself a mimicking the tilt happening in the Still at times, as I look at it! There's also a balance of efforts happening here. In order for this still to be available on our digital Media platform, it had to go through several complicated and slightly obscure digital preservation processes; and in order for me to be able to access it I had to go through several layers of logins and internet links, and it felt like a real process to access it - so it feels a bit like we've met in the middle!
There are lots of elements that really date this still - it's in black and white, it's an old-fashioned camp, the clothing style, etc. But it's with the balance that there is no aspect of temporal distance, because it's such a normal human motion when you're in a car, it's a movement that I would still do in a car today or that I would see someone who's driving doing a car today. It's also very much a snapshot, so it feels like a singular moment or a slice of the moment, but the content of the image is someone who is on a journey, so maybe metaphorically isn't on solid ground or is in the middle of something. So not unbalanced, but maybe a sense of being poised.
A man is driving a car while leaning slightly to one side, so that he can talk better into a radio. The main character is physically unbalanced, but the composition of the shot is very balanced: if you divide it into thirds vertically, the driver occupies the central third, and then the left hand third would be the empty dark background, and the right hand third is the empty shadowy backseat.
Image (printed)
Yes