Minimalism
The word minimalist seems to be in the process of being dumbed down. Or at least it has been so over-used that for most people it has become no more than a catchword. When applied to design, it seems now to mean mainly white or mainly black with not very much in it. Applied to photography, just not very much in it. Almost universally, however, it is considered a term of approval, a rigorous trashing of anything fussy and decorative, even from those who wouldn’t actually want it in their homes or on their walls. In fact, it has a precise history in art and design, beginning in the 1960s, with influences that go back earlier, to the beginnings of modernism. And for photography there are two routes: that of choosing minimalist subjects to shoot, and that of making minimal compositions from any subject. Bring the two together and you have the recipe for very graphic and often abstract imagery, but to take this an important step further, we ought to make sure that the image is actually working towards a result, conveying the essence of the scene or the subject.
The Japanese influence: Minimalism in the West was inspired to an extent by Japanese principles of simplicity and understatement, which go all the way back to Zen Buddhism. This Zen meditation space is rigorous in its simplicity, and a squared-up, centred viewpoint seemed appropriate for such an ascetic room.
Minimalism is best known through design, particularly product design, interior design and architecture. Indeed, minimalist home designs have survived and even gained in popularity over a remarkably long time, which suggests a fundamental appeal rather than a passing fashion. Not everyone wants to live in minimalist surroundings, of course, but most people admit to seeing the value of stripping things down to their essentials — which is the underlying theme for minimalist design:
“Less is more” Mies van der Rohe architect
“Less but better” Dieter Rams product designer
“Doing more with less” Buckminster Fuller structural engineer
These are mantras that are rarely challenged, because they go right to the heart of modernism. In composition, which is what we’re interested in here, they argue for economy of means, structure and unification. Above all, minimalism is reductive; it involves paring things away and stripping the result down to the essentials.
This, I think, is where the street use and the original use of the word part ways — essentials. To tackle minimalism in photography seriously means thinking about what the essentials are, and then paring down the composition to concentrate on them. Or on it. This is the visual equivalent of ‘form follows function’, which translates in photography into pictures that do their job with economy of means, showing only what is needed and no more.
Minimalist subject: Contemporary interior design is one source of subject, here an all-metal office interior, including the floor. The single chair was the designer’s choice. The minimalism in the composition comes from the squared-up camera angle and the near-central positioning of the window and chair.
Naturally, it’s a stylistic choice, and not for everyone. It also depends very much on the subject or scene; you’d be hard put making a minimalist image of a Baroque church. This, then, is the first route to minimalist photography: finding a suitable subject. The world of design and architecture is valuable ground, and there are three examples here, two of them contemporary, one of them (the oratorio), vernacular. The natural world also furnishes pared-down scenes, both through elemental topography (the meeting of sea and sky is one obvious example) and through light (such as mist, fog, contre-jour). There are two examples here.
Minimalism without sophistication: The interior of an adobe oratorio (a small building for prayer) in New Mexico, with a plain mud floor and walls and only a small cross for decoration. Minimalist shooting involved flat lighting (no direct sunlight), a frontal squared-up camera angle, and a framing in which the far wall is almost centred. More space was given to the floor so as to avoid showing much of the timbered ceiling, and so keeping the graphic activity in the picture to a minimum.
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Finding the essentials: A contemporary lampstand, and two ways of dealing with it. In the smaller image it is shown full height and in its setting: a standard interior shot. But the design of the lamp can be more effectively put across with a much tighter shot. The basic cone shape, thin column, texture, the distinctive cut-out, and even how the light from the lamp falls on the wall are all contained in this one part. By eliminating everything else, we see more of its lines, especially the play of diagonals.
But whether or not you look for a minimalist subject, the techniques for shooting a minimal image borrow from the same set used by designers and painters — focusing on reduction, elimination, cutting out. This is followed by selection and can be enhanced by processing, in order to keep the inevitably largely empty areas smooth and consistent in tone and/or colour. And an emphasis on clean, simple lines and shapes in preference to the complex fractal ones often found in nature. The process, however, is rather the reverse of that in minimalist painting, because the starting point is a scene in reality that is likely to be messy, rather than a blank canvas. The process usually begins with ultra-careful framing, by choosing viewpoint and focal length in order to find the cleanest and simplest section of the scene. Then, balance and division need to be handled in such a way that the ‘blank’ areas get their due prominence — if there are accents, eccentric placement may be the answer.
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Stressing void space: empty space is a regular feature of the Minimalist style, and one way to express it is by lacing a subject eccentrically. In this SX-70 Polaroid image of winter fields, the composition was kept severe by placing the line of trees low and and aligned to the bottom edge. The very limited colour palette, the freezing mist and full exposure all play their part.
To sum up, the following six points will usually get you close to a true minimalist image:-
Minimalist photography
1. Choose a minimalist subject: not essential, of course, but with minimalism so popular in design, one obvious route for photography
2. Framing: to cut out elements from the view
3. Similar tone and colour: many minimalist images have a simple overall theme of tone and/or colour. White has a special place in minimalism, so when lightness is the theme, this suggests full exposure just short of highlight clipping, together with low contrast.
4. Clean lines: simple, preferably geometric lines and shapes
5. Processing: to unify areas of tone or colour, or to heighten contrast with an accent. Contrast, clarity and vibrance controls in raw converters are all useful, as is careful control of exposure, recovery and clipping.
6. Emptiness: negative areas in the frame are important in minimalism, and call for sensitivity in handling when composing. They typically need to be organised so that the attention will fall on them, and often call for smooth, clean rendering (which may be a matter of processing — see above)
Fascinating. Visually I’m particularly struck by the emphasis on empty space and on squared-off compositions, neither of which feature often in my pictures. More fundamentally I hope to further explore the idea of paring down to essentials. Lots of food for thought in this. Thanks!