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.
