As part of this course I have visited a number of exhibitions. From these visits I have identified a need to learn more about how to interpret and read photographs and pictures. Stephen Shore’s The Nature of Photographs is a very useful book as it has helped me to interpret what I see in front of me when looking at images but has also introduced me to new ways of thinking about exactly what a photograph is.
Although we often speak of capturing a moment with a camera, I never really thought too deeply about the process of transforming the world in front of us into a photograph until I read this book. I never really thought so much of my learning on The Art of Photography course as learning how to use the tools that define and interpret content. Instead I believe I thought of them as skills, but skills are a completely different concern when applied to photography.
Photographs are two dimensional whereas we see the world three dimensionally. This monocular vision can throw up some frustrating results when shooting but can also provide some interesting outcomes. For example, in some images the background can have an effect on the foreground. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I have taken an image which looked fine at the time of shooting only to see that my subject has a tree growing out its head or similar. Our eyes can distinguish between the foreground and the background but the camera can’t. This is referred to as a product of photographic vision.
Photographs differ to paintings. Shore refers to the photographer as being faced with the messiness of the world and imposing order on a scene to create an image. Painting is very much the opposite. As photographers it is our job to select and simplify the mess in front of us and transform it into a rectangular image. This is done by choosing a frame, exposure, vantage point and a plane of focus.
Shore writes about the visual language that we use when talking about photographs. I found this section of the book very relevant to me and the stage at which I am at on my work.
The Depictive level
The formal character of an image is a range of optical and physical factors which define the physical level of the photograph. The four central ways in which the world in front of the camera is transformed into a photographic image are:
1. Flatness.
As I mentioned earlier photographs are monocular. When we look at the picture plane (field the lens’ image is projected) we choose a variety of ways in which to add depth or the illusion of depth to our images. For example, aperture – depth of field and shallow focus. Some images are opaque and some are transparent.
2. Frame
Photographs have edges whilst the world doesn’t. These edges create relationships between the lines and shapes of the image. The frame can be passive or active. An active frame where the frame works inward and draws the viewer in. Passive usually relates to the subject working out of the frame.
3. Time
Not just shutter speed but more so the static nature of the photograph. The world keeps moving but the camera provides a static image of this moving world. We can look at time under the headings of Frozen time, Extrusive time and still time.
4. Focus
The camera sees monocularly from a particular vantage point. It creates a hierarchy in the depictive space by defining a single plane of focus which is parallel to the picture. The spatial hierarchy can be removed only by photographing a flat subject parallel to the picture plane. This is why we get distortion in our images which is something we don’t see without eyes.
I have noticed that I see my pictures and the pictures of others differently since I invested in this book. The next section in the book is the Mental level and I plan to move onto that shortly.
