“Kong,” by Roc Canals and “Kids Staring,” by Zisis Kardianos, via Two for the Road

There are a lot of places online which bring together photography from various sources. Many of them model themselves after print publications of the past — “online photography magazine” is all too ubiquitous a phrase these days.

Some of them, like The Big Picture and Pictory (which we discussed previously) take an approach that is more web-centric, but still presents variations on the basic model of the photo essay. Others take the form of flickr groups or web galleries, etc. that curate content.

James Turnley’s Two for the Road takes a different approach, presenting just two photographs at a time, side by side, with no textual apparatus attached. This is the most spare form of photographic sequencing, and one which I think is particularly well-suited to online viewing. After all, despite a deliberate push towards more longform content by many of the best and brightest in web design and publishing (Pictory is an example of this school of thought), the fact remains that a scroll bar is often the death blow of viewer attention.

I, at least, have great difficulty in treating a twenty-image sequence on a web site as a unified whole, especially if the theme or narrative threading them together is tenuous to begin with. A two-image sequence does not stretch the thread as severely to begin with, and it can be regarded by the viewer as a unified whole or even a single work much more easily.

The selections (mostly by Turnley, so far as I can tell, with some pairings suggested by members of the associated flickr group) are for the most part very good, and often very funny — not surprising, since paired photographs do tend to lend themselves to visual puns. The ones that make the cut at Two for the Road are mostly of a high quality, and the best of them are not merely clever, but something more.

In the case above, the detached and studied-feeling view of “Kong” together with the unabashed joy and awe on the faces of “Kids Staring,” elicits from me an immediate laugh, but a laugh followed by a lingering sense of true participation in the childish wonder which is (albeit virtually) directed at the wonderful and absurd park attraction.

Unfortunately, it’s rather problematic to link either directly to a given pairing on Two for the Road or to the individual photographs. So far as I can tell, there are no permalinks to the posts, and the images themselves are variously linked the flickr group, the photographer’s website, or nothing at all. And even if the images are in the group pool, thanks to flickr’s questionable implementation of searching, it can be difficult to find a photograph if it doesn’t happen to have an easily guessable title or tag. This doesn’t really prevent one from enjoying the pairings on Two for the Road, but it can be quite frustrating if you’re curious about a particular photograph and want to find out more about it.