Well, I wouldn’t take a photo and then later ask if there was meaning in it. With respect, that seems the wrong way round. Having your mind made up to say something meaningful about a scene should happen BEFORE you half-press the shutter button. The question now is: what meaning might one want to have in such a shot? That is something for you to answer, Gianluca, not me. Yes, I think the imagination should be engaged before you shoot. That doesn’t mean you will always capture the meaning you intend to capture, of course, but it increases the chances of your image saying something you want it to say.
To me it’s a nice picture, but it is not conveying to me a meaning or even a thought beyond ‘this is a beautiful scene’. So, your suggestion of a tourist postcard does come to mind. I feel you are unhappy with the image, and would like to shoot more meaningful images. Sometimes I shoot such images. In tourist cities like Edinburgh and Padua it is hard to get beyond the tourist look. So I would encourage you to work more on critical pre-visualisation. What would you like to comment on, and how are you going to capture it? Sometimes we don’t know, but have a ‘gut feeling’ for something. Just keep asking yourself questions.
One thing that helped me was shooting film, which can be expensive. Every exposure matters. It slows you down, and you generally end up thinking-through the shot more before clicking. I did this so much that when I am shooting digital, I restrict my day to 36 shots, and often use far less.
I like the photos from your websites, which have a civic context, and that is their meaning. So you shoot architectural features. Atget did that in Paris, shooting architecture, railings, staircases, etc. But people now seem them as art. Art has a very wide and varied landscape.
