Anecdotal lesson about authorial control

I recently posted a photo on Flickr:

Oxford Street, London, England

And I entered this photo into the Instruction #01 of the "Street and Repeat - 105" group.  Unfortunately, my photo wasn't selected as one of those to go through to the curated pool, but it was very interesting to read the comments added by fellow group members.  In street photography, I deliberately do not give my images captions when they are posted to Flickr.  They are named after the location I took them in so as to leave interpretation open.  Not one of the comments I received reflected what I saw when I took the photo. What I had noticed and the reason why I took the photo, was firstly that the man and the woman in the poster had the same straight white hair, so the photo is about the irony of that juxtaposition.  The other thing I was excited about was having seen the fictional "Lucius Malfoy" from the Harry Potter series, so it was also a shot with a bit of humour.  These are the comments I received:

The comments refer to:

• Sci-fi exploration
• Two other characters: Biff Byford and Bill Murray
• Fantasies about glamorous ladies
• Deep thinking
• Conjuring up a magician's accomplice
• A floating head
• A head being a badge

I amazed that the interpretations went deeper than my original thinking, and also very pleased about this.  But this process also taught me a bit more about loss of authorial control.  In this case, I didn't want any authorial control, hence the image is not captioned or described, but it does show that you cannot predict how other people will read an image and what context/narrative they will assign to it.

It's the first picture I've ever posted on Flickr that has received feedback like this and it was also very interesting to see how a whole narrative can be created out of a simple two-point composition.  If I had added a caption that directed interpretation, the reaction might have been quite different.