Chess in the Street

With 2321 Flickr views and 89 faves (favorites), this photo has received more than the usual amount of interest. But why?

Checkmate © Flickr user Luis Alvarez Marra under Creative Commons.

What are we looking at anyway? There must be more to the image than just two guys playing chess. The photo's description said,

They were so focused that I could spend several minutes photographing. I was seduced by how submerged they were in the game. By the way, I took it on the Pau Buscató Workshop that I attended. It was incredible and I highly recommend it. For those interested, this is the link: www.buscato.net/spw/.

That page is titled, 'WORKSHOPS : Pau Buscató : STREET PHOTOGRAPHY'. Add that to the names of some of the 32 groups to which the photo belongs -- 'Street Photography - Fotografia di Strada', 'Street Photographers', and 'Street Scene Shooters', etc. -- and we start to understand that this represents a particular form of art.

One comment to the photo said (translated from the original Spanish), 'Very original photo with chess players blurred by the reflections.' Another said, 'Very well framed. One is almost the mirror reflection of the other.' The 'WORKSHOPS : STREET PHOTOGRAPHY' page informs,

Pau Buscató is a street photographer from Barcelona, currently based in Oslo, Norway. He studied architecture but after some years of practice abandoned his career to focus exclusively on photography. He is a member of the international street photography collective Burn My Eye.

The Pau Buscató - Burn My Eye page adds,

I walk around looking for those 'poetic accidents' that sometimes take place in our most mundane and repetitive daily lives. An open mind, intuition and fresh eyes will help me see and translate them into a personal photographic language, but as with many translations it won't be exact and literal: I'm not documenting the world as it is, I'm re-presenting it as I see it.

Earlier this year on Flickr Friday we saw a street performer in Posing for Euros (March 2017) and street art in No Monkey Business Here (July 2017). Now we have street photography.