all photos ~ (embiggenable)
iMnsho, one of the best texts ever written about photography–in general but also about color photography specifically–is the intro essay by John Szarkowski in the book William Eggleston’s Guide. I truly believe, without exaggeration, it could easily be a syllabus for a year of photography graduate studies.
I mention Szarkowski’s text cuz yesterday, at a big family / clan gathering (our daughter married into it), I showed my an ADIRONDACK Guide proof book to a respected artist / university art professor (a painter) and one of the many things he liked about the work was my sense of “composition”. His comments brought to my mind something Szarkowski, in his essay, quoted, re: composition–the words of the photographer Robert Adams–which my artist acquaintance sorta mirrored ….
in the act of making photographs…. “the photographer inventories what seems an endless number of angles; he explains, if asked, that he is trying for effective composition, but hesitates to define it. What he means is that a photographer wants form, an unarguably right relationships of shapes, a visual stability in which all components are equally important. The photographer hopes, in brief, to discover a tension so exact that it is peace …. The form the photographer records, though discovered in a split second of literal fact, …. implies an order beyond itself, a landscape into which all fragments, no matter how imperfect, fit perfectly.”
With the exception of “inventories what seems an endless number of angles”–cuz I generally inventory subtle arrangements of a single angle–that quote pretty much describes my picture making M.O., re: “composition”. FYI, I place quotes around the word composition–the act of arranging parts or elements to form a whole–cuz unless a photographer is making a still life, he/she arranges nothing. The best he/she can do is to select a POV that visually organizes the visual elements, perceived as “shapes” of a framed segment of the real world, into a pattern that, to his/her eye and sensibilities, creates “an unarguably right relationships of shapes”, aka: a pleasing / interesting form. An act that Szarkowski describes as “a contest between a photographer and the presumptions of approximate and habitual seeing.”
That written, it should be emphasized that this process of organizing has no “rules”. The playing field on which the “contest” is played is infinitely variable and, consequently, so are the possibilities that might be employed in the engagement*. And, since there are no rules to guide the practitioner, the primary “tools” available to solve the problem are feel and intuition; in my experience, the recognition of the right relationship of shapes is truly “discovered in a split second”, i.e. a photographer just knows it when he sees and feels it. If a photographer thinks about it, iMnsho, that’s a recipe for failure, or at least; a recipe for approximate and habitual seeing.
All that that written, here’s the million dollar question; can this “tool”–feel / intuition–be learned or taught? My life experience, mine that of others with whom I am familiar, lrans me in the direction of “No.” It is something that one either has or does not have"; a “god*”-given gift, if you will, or so the adage goes.
In my case, it took me a long time–most of my life so far–to recognize that, while I have very good eyesight, i.e. being able to perceive depth and distance, aka: my vision, I also have, simultaneously, an ability to “see” shapes–if you will, sprinkled about the landscape–comprised of color, tone, lines, et al. An ability that exists without any, absolutely none, conscious awareness on my part. It just is what is. Asking me to explain it is like asking me to explain why I am 6’3”, 215 lbs. I can’t, other than to paraphrase Popeye, “I am what I am and that’s all that I am.”
This ability allows me to see, as Szarkowski put it, both the blue and the sky.
AN AMUSING ANECDOTE : re: composition. Adams wrote that a photographer “hesitates to explain it.” Szarkowski explains that hesitancy thusly:
When it was pointed out to Eggleston that “the design of most of [his] pictures seemed to radiate from central, circular core … [Eggleston] replied, after a barely perceptible hesitation, that this was true, since the pictures were based compositionally on the Confederate flag–not the asterisk, or the common daisy, or the Dove of the Holy Ghost, but the Confederate flag. The response was presumably improvised and unresponsive, of interest only as an illustration of the lengths to which artists sometimes go to frustrate rational analysis of their work, as though they fear it might prove an antidote to their magic,”
*as I learned in the Army, the “in the field expediency method”
**DO NOT, I REPEAT, DO NOT get me started on the idea of a supreme being hanging around in the prenatal division of creation handing out special gifts to lucky individuals.