Thoughts on Photography - Jody Edition
The comment that got me thinking over the past year was from Ann’s former co-worker and friend (ok, my friend too) Jody. She said, “I’d like to hear more about how framing in photography is more intentional than in painting.” I concede, it was a pretty brash, broad sweeping statement. And I certainly did not mean to disparage any other art, but each of the arts, to include design arts, are different, despite all of the other similarities they may share. And while there are certainly painters and drawers who pay close attention to the edges of their work and how particular elements may interact with those edges, I feel very comfortable in saying that getting the framing wrong in those other arts is not the same kiss of death it can be with a photograph, or the benefits as great as getting it right in a photograph.
Perhaps it is the mechanical nature of photography, or the fact that an image is always seen through a frame - whether in the act of making the image through a viewfinder, the LCD back of a digital camera/phone, or even a large-format ground glass, or while viewing the image - but photography is different. Or it may be that the photographers that worked to distinguish photography from the other visual arts in reaction to “pictorialism” in photography (Ansel Adams, Edward and Brett Weston, Paul Strand and others), the photographers who I consider my teachers, through their efforts to explore the uniqueness of photography, whether in subject matter or how it is depicted, brought a focus on the act of framing that wasn’t especially prevalent or discussed in the other arts.
Of course, I’m discussing generalities here because there are plenty of photographers who have moved away from these ideas and many painters who have turned their attention to these ideas (and ways of seeing). But for these photographers whose approaches I pursue, it isn’t merely enough to include the desired elements/subjects within the frame, and to include the key elements in relation with each other (using composition and relationship theories that are shared by many visual arts - certainly not unique to photography), it was also crucial to pay close attention to the relationship of these elements to the edges of the frame. Not all elements, not all edges and not in all instances. But given the preciseness of a photographic frame, it tends to matter much more to a photograph than in most other visual arts. Photographs don’t float about on a page like a sketch can and often does. A photograph doesn’t have loose edges like many watercolor paintings, and certainly doesn’t get re-stretched and placed within a new frame that may overlap the painting quite differently than the previous frame without substantially altering the image. In photography, the frame is very, very intentional and often, very precise. Just look at the right edge in the image below.
Ann and I recently watched an On Landscape Q&A video with Tim Parkin and Joe Cornish where they discussed the types of images submitted to recent landscape photography competitions. They lamented the recent focus on technical techniques to achieve a certain kind of “look” for an image, with recognition that the images are very appealing and interesting to the eye. They commented, however, that all too many of the images really seemed to ignore what they both thought are the two most important elements to a landscape photograph - Where do you place your camera? How do you frame the image? I couldn’t agree with them more on those two points. Only I’d add a third element - When do you press the shutter?
As I’ve posted before, Ansel Adams once said, “A good photograph is knowing where to stand.” Where precisely you stand determines the relationship between the elements of a photograph. Moving left or right, forward or backward will change the relationships between these elements. As will climbing on top of a rock so that the rocks in the mid-distance will visually be blow the ridge line of the mountains behind, as in the image below. Then again, the tripod couldn’t rise too high or else the crown of the tree would merge with the ridge line as well.
Once you’re in the right location, the framing of the image becomes key. In large part, what you want inside and outside of the image will determine the focal length of the lens you choose to use, but the framing will often dictate that you need to move backwards or forwards a few inches, lower or raise your tripod a bit, or tilt your lens down so that you include the entire rock in the bottom left corner as well as the horizontal crack even lower in the frame. And it will determine precisely where the frame cuts that tree to the right. I made 4 micro-adjustments to that edge (and photographs of each) - adjustments that included more or less of that tree - before making the final images of this shot. All of that happening as the sun was rising. For those two edges - the right and bottom edges - the framing was essential.
And last, in my mind, is when you press the shutter. Fractions of a second can matter. Not always, but when they do, they do. This is one aspect of the essence of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s work - “To take a photograph means to recognize - simultaneously and within a fraction of a second - both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning.” The “decisive moment” isn’t just pressing the shutter at the right time, it’s that pressing the shutter at the right moment combines with the geometries of everything else in the image to create a compelling photograph. And the frame was critical to Henri Cartier-Bresson as well. With the exception of one image I know of (photographed through a fence, so there is a rail along one vertical edge that generally gets cropped out when printed), Cartier-Bresson insisted that his images be printed full-frame, usually showing the black border of the unexposed film negative around the image. For him, the frame is how he saw it and had to be included in a print of the image.
Sometimes the timing isn’t just the specific instant, but the time of day you’re at a place - the quality of pre-dawn light is very different than sunset. So timing matters as well, but that’s not the topic of this post.
This post is about framing the image and how the edges of the frame are often of critical importance. So much so that there is an adage in photography - before you press the shutter, give a quick glance around the edges of the image to make sure they are clean. Unlike drawing or painting (I’m not including massive photoshop work here, which I do not do), photographers can’t just add elements into a photograph or remove them. It is up to the photographer to decide what is within and what is excluded from the frame (the photograph), as well as to decide exactly where the frame line is placed.
Here, it was critical to me precisely where the tips of the branches on the upper left were located (namely separated from each other) and that the tip of the left most stem came close to, but did not touch that left edge. Once I determined how I wanted that edge to be, I moved inward and outward until I was happy with the right edge, deciding that I wanted the branch on the right to exit precisely at the corner, with parts of the branch on the right edge and part on the top. This was one of those instances where moving the tripod an inch one direction or another radically altered the way everything fell within the frame. It must have taken me 10 minutes to get the framing just so. Even then, the dark branch in the upper center is a bit distracting and leading out of the frame. I chose to deal with that photographically, by minimizing my depth of field so that it is blurry and less distracting. I could of course clone/photoshop it out, but as I said, I tend not to do that with major elements of an image.
Perhaps an example from one of Ann’s images is worth examining too. I’ve always loved this image below that Ann made during our first trip to the desert Southwest in 2015. The dirty little secret of this image is that, behind the tree and the rock base is a parking lot. A large parking lot. And behind the camera, facing the other direction, is the view of Canyonlands from Dead Horse Point. Most people are looking in that direction, not the one Ann chose.
Anyway, Ann has had the image up on her monitor a few time recently and I’ve taken a couple of opportunities to sit in chair and study it to try and understand why I find it so appealing. Part of it is, as Charlie Waite might say, everything is just so. Even the rock at the bottom right part of the image, close to the edge. As I studied the image, I realized that rock keeps your eye from dropping outside of the frame and forces you back into the image of the rocks, the trees, the clouds then down again, only to be bounced back up because of that rock. So I asked Ann if she had any images without the rock.
She has one without the rock at all and, as I suspected, the eye just drops off the bottom of the image. There’s nothing that keeps your eye in the frame. It also lacks the feeling that you can walk into that space enclosed by the rocks It is a much weaker image.
But Ann also had another variation, one where the edge cuts through the rock, seen in the image below. While not so “bottomless” as the other image, the cut-in-half rock not only doesn’t fulfill its role of bouncing the eye back into the frame, it becomes an active distraction - pulling the eye to it and holding your eye at the edge of the frame, doing . . . nothing. This is precisely what the “check your edges” adage is talking about. Compare the effect of that cut-in-half rock with the thin, curved black line the right-most edge of the large rock to the right creates with the right edge. That rock is intentional in its interaction with the edge, the bottom rock isn’t.
Ann’s decisions regarding the relationships of the bottom rock and that rock to the right with their respective edges go a long way to making this image seem “right.” Those elements have an importance far beyond what I believe they would have in any other art.
One doesn’t have to make many photographs to understand that a stray branch entering into a frame can kill an image. Or a person cut in half. Or . . . any number of unintentional interactions with objects and the frame of a photograph. Having a distracting edge can take away from what matters in the center of the image. You have to work to first see and then exclude those distracting elements from your photograph . . . if you can. But you also learn that you can also play with the edges of an image, make the edge of the frame a part of the composition in a way that further enhances the image.
That idea of being precise with the framing is as valid for grander landscapes . . .
. . . as it is for more detailed compositions.
And it certainly applies to more abstract images, perhaps even more so.
The above image and the one below, play with a Japanese concept called “ma.” Ma is the spacing between things. Sometimes one seeks the ma that creates balance and harmony, such as in the perfect spacing between stepping stones to guide the pace of one walking through a garden. Other times, one seeks the right ma to add tension to an image. The spacing between the curve of the rock and the left edge in the image above, or the rock and right edge (showing the sky) to the image below were intentional to create a tension within the image. (As is the gap below between the two rocks just below the sky in the image below.) I know of no other arts, other than graphic design, that intentionally manipulates the fine relationship between forms in the image and the edge of the image the way photography does. (Music has its own ma in the pregnant pauses between beats, which is an entirely different application of the concept.)
That’s pretty much it, why I think framing and edges are so important to photography and important in a way that is fundamentally different than other arts. I suspect that those arts have concerns and considerations that simply are not present (or possibly not even relevant) in photography and, as noted above, most visual arts share some if not many considerations. That, in part, is what makes each art unique.