Waiting To Board

I found this scene along a neglected stretch of riverbank—nothing curated, nothing arranged. A broken chair, its straw seat long unravelled, faced a decaying boat tethered loosely to the shore. They looked like they belonged to each other, equally abandoned, equally patient. The title came instantly. Not poetic, just accurate: Waiting to Board.

The composition rests on tension—foreground versus background, texture versus reflection. The rope cuts a diagonal across the frame, literally tying the objects together. The chair leans slightly left, softened by rot and time, while the boat points right, cracked paint peeling toward the water. Neither is in motion, yet the whole image feels held in anticipation.

Technically, the challenge was in exposure. The light was diffused, mid-afternoon cloud cover, and I had to preserve detail both in the concrete’s gritty surface and the soft reflection on the water. I exposed for the highlights, allowing the shadows under the chair and inside the hull to deepen without fully collapsing. Colour is minimal—blue, grey, and muted browns—but sufficient to differentiate elements without overwhelming the mood.

There’s no trick here. No symmetry, no rules of thirds strictly obeyed. Just spatial honesty: objects where they are, how they are. I didn’t crop the frame. I didn’t clean it up. The broken mesh of the chair, the cracked dock, even the rust streaks on the hull—all of it remains, because all of it matters.

What made the shot for me wasn’t the decay. It was the human absence. This chair was meant to be occupied. That boat was built to carry someone. And yet, both are empty. They face each other like two ends of a question. Will someone arrive? Will something resume?

The photograph doesn’t answer. It just waits.