Wonk
or
Does composition matter?
The appeal of most photographs lie in one of two ways — or a combination of both. Through the subject, and through the way in which the image is put together: the composition, broadly speaking. Of course, making an appealing photograph begs the larger question of aiming to please, which is another subject I’ll look at later, but assuming for now that you do want an outcome that engages the viewer, it means thinking about whether what is in front of the camera is interesting and thinking about how to frame it, angle it, light it so that the result is striking, satisfying. It’s this second part that I’m thinking about right now.
Cormorant fisherman, Erhai, Yunnan
The definition of composition that most people would agree on is something on the lines of ‘making order out of chaos’. Henri Cartier-Bresson wrote that “Photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.” It is, as you might expect, usually considered desirable, a skill in all graphic art, from painting to photography, to be mastered and developed. And I happen to believe in it myself, but let’s not let personal prejudices stand in the way of a good argument. There are other schools of thought in photography that dismiss deliberate and striking composition, consider it too calculating and too conventional. And worst of all, too much aimed at satisfying the audience. This seems partly, at least, a product of the post-modernism that has entered photography since the 1970s.
Skill in composition has a long history in art, for as long as painters have worked within a frame. I have a marvellous book called The Painter’s Secret Geometry: A Study of Composition in Art, by Charles Bouleau (though horribly expensive because out of print), in which the writer meticulously explores the many ways in which painters, period by period, composed in order to make their pictures more effective, at times directing the viewer’s eye, at others searching for underlying principles of harmony. The unquestioned assumption was always that composition was a skill that could make a picture more satisfying in some way. Photography inherited all of this, although photographers had to work with what was actually in front of them, so that techniques were mainly of choosing viewpoint and focal length, and framing. Composition in the Middle Ages was heavily influenced by religious symbolism, musical harmony inspired many Renaissance painters, otherwise what worked in composition tended to be discovered empirically. Certain ways of organising images were found to have a particular effect on the viewer. The same with photography, and if a little post-analysis showed that there seemed to be an underlying geometry, that was harmless enough. Cartier-Bresson again: “Any geometrical analysis …. can be done only after the photograph has been taken ….” Nowadays, research in neuroscience is beginning give a more accurate picture of why and how viewers react to composition.
Soccer practice, Cartagena, Colombia
But this Is still only half of the story. We can demonstrate that certain techniques of composition will be likely to affect viewers in a more-or-less predictable way, and a large part of my recent book The Photographer’s Eye explored this. But is that what you actually want? Predictable means being conventional, and photography has a rich tradition of conventions being flouted. It’s possibly also more subject to changes in taste and fashion than most other creative forms. This is the point of interest for me now: how composition is used, unused or misused, and the frank antipathy between different schools.
Personally, I can identify five styles — or perhaps I should say intentions — in photographic composition:-
Skilled and conventional Examples include, despite their different approaches, Ansel Adams and Henri Cartier-Bresson
Skilled and unconventional The techniques are challenging and meant to surprise, but they still have a positive purpose, like the first category. This is a hard act to maintain, but examples of photographers who have at times done this notably, include Mark Cohen, Guy Bourdin, Pete Turner.
Uninflected That’s the art-crit term for a deadpan, post-modernist approach that eschews interest through composition. Thus, anti-conventional. Examples include Bernd and Hilla Becher and most of their Dusseldorf protegés; also Robert Adams.
Naïve The standard for people who are not interested in being photographers, yet use a camera. Much less common in the photography world, but it makes an appearance in one branch of fine-art photography. The Japanese photographer Hiromix (real name Toshikawa Hiromi) is an example. Her work drives my Tokyo agent Bob Kirschenbaum apopleptic, but then he’s a traditionalist. Of course, if naïve work attracts fame and fortune, it then also attracts the suspicion that it is knowing and mannered…
Unconcerned Meaning the photographer simply attaches a lower priority to composition than to other things going on. Wonky horizons are simply not a matter of concern to the photographer, though they irritate conservative viewers no end. Examples include Robert Frank and Gary Winogrand.
Actually, it’s this last category that I’m the most interested in right now, partly because it’s the 50th anniversary of the English edition of Robert Frank’s The Americans and I’m in a Robert Frank mood, and I’m fascinated by the ability of some of his half-century old images to still rile and annoy. The bulk of the American reviews of the book were highly critical, with the influential-among-amateurs Popular Photography magazine being particularly scathing. Seven of the magazine’s editors expressed their generally conservative displeasure, including the following on Frank’s technique, which was considered to be part and parcel of a dyspeptic view of America: “meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons and general sloppiness.”
Ground zero for conventional composition is a horizontal horizon. Departures from this are often mistakes, but with one major qualifier, which is this: only if it was meant to be straight. If you just don’t care, then it’s another matter. And if you treat the horizon or other obviously level surface as just another line in the image to be used graphically, then it’s your judgment up for criticism, not your technique.
Bulang kitchen, Jingmaishan, Yunnan
There’s an article from the U.S. National Public Radio site on Robert Frank here…
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100688154
….including a downloadable audio file of the programme, which I strongly recommend; it includes a new interview with Frank, now 84 years old.
But now look at this remarkable (in its way) treatment on a recent website, which pauses not just to examine a particular image, but to go to work on it in Photoshop! This is the last image discussed in the NPR programme…
http://www.imaging-resource.com/IRNEWS/ …and go to the archives for May 22, 2009.
The web writer mentions that “The image itself suffers from the confrontation. The horizon is so crooked that the tree looks straight and the hill the couple are reclining on seems flat. And the two of them are washed out enough that the drama is muted. The sky, on what is clearly a sunny day, is dull and gray. It was taken in haste. We grabbed the picture from one site or another, opened it in Photoshop and got to work. We straightened the horizon and recropped the image. Then we adjusted the levels to brighten the sky and get some black in the image. And, without question, the image came to life. It was more dramatic, pulling you into it in a way the original just hinted at.”
Stunning. I hope no-one ever does that with one of mine!
