What qualities are we looking for when making a photograph? I have a few thoughts on the question (naturally!). At a certain level, I think we are interested in photographs that are both surprising and familiar. There is a process of looking that every good photograph entails in its viewer. It can’t be read all at once, taken solely at face value; it arrests, and we digest.
Key to that process is the ability of a photograph to surprise. And before I even consider what elements of a photo can work to surprise the viewer, I want to mention that there is a three-dimensional way in which photographs can surprise or arrest us, irrespective of content. That is simply their placement with non-like kind. Think of a bare wall, white or gray, very neutral. The mere existence of a photograph on that wall offers a pleasant surprise. That’s a way you can think of photographs being presented, in your everyday, three-dimensional life – your real life, which you experience in the physical world, not in a book or on a screen. I believe that bears mentioning precisely because we exist in so many different moods, with different priorities, during our daily lives, and a primary effect of art is to raise one above the everyday. What more effective way to do this as a photographer than to place photographs in and among us, physically?
If you don’t already practice this, take this as a recommendation to print and frame your photos, hang them on the wall and look at them as you go about your life. There’s something not quite wholesome about how compartmentalized our experience of photography can get when we chiefly rely on internet sites and cyberspace to get our inspiration. It’s not quite diagnosable, but it’s there. So give it a shot.
Often, the placement in three-dimensional meatspace, as the cyberpunks like to call it, is all the surprise you need to make a photograph work in that context. That’s why wall-mounted photos don’t tend to be complicated. A complex street scene like a Garry Winogrand shot with a wide angle lens where a lot of things are working with one another inside the frame might not function as effectively as a simple landscape with a pleasing color palette. Something with contrasting shapes to offset the squared-off geometric spaces of an interior. Your placement has done its job if you look with a sense of pleasure at the colors of a sunset or the shape of rolling hills or the contrasting light and shadow of a black and white scene.
Familiarity is also simple with these photographs. A loved one’s face, a family outing, a comforting landscape. The actual content of your photograph can be focused on the warm feelings it raises in the viewer, or the pleasing aesthetic of a scene from a familiar genre (like a landscape, or a simple portrait). Placement in the real world has already done its job, if you hung the photo in the right spot.
I will follow up with another post exploring the surprising and familiar with photographs in another context, like a book or a screen.
The Sprocket Docket 