PICTURE POWER

The photograph of American composer Philip Glass taken by Laura Barisonzi (February cover feature, above) adds a great deal of detail to the article. The background environment is of unmitigated concrete structures of grey and black. All surfaces are hard, unforgiving and tightly closed, with only the smallest vestiges of black and barren tree branches barely discernible on the left. Glass, dressed in the same drab and dark colours of the background, faces us with an expressionless, uncompromising cold stare, his large black shoes firmly anchoring him to the concrete slabs of the walkway. Congratulations to Barisonzi for creating such a powerfully telling image which reflects the sterility so presciently depicted by TS Eliot in his 1922 poem The Waste Land.

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