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Each Threshold Concept has a supporting image inspired by our Photopedagogy camera. TC #4 shows a selective crop of a face, an eye and a pair of spectacles.
Threshold Concept #4Photography is an art of selection rather than invention. Photography is unlike other visual arts in that it begins with a world full of things rather than with a blank slate. However, photography is also an art of production, not just reflection. It does things to the subjects it represents.
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Photographs are not, as is often assumed, a mechanical record. Every time we look at a photograph, we are aware, however slightly, of the photographer selecting that sight from an infinity of other possible sights.
— John Berger
In this short film we see the American photographer, Garry Winogrand, at work on the streets of Santa Monica, California in the early 1980s. Winogrand is famous for his no-nonsense approach and his modest claims for photography. In the film he talks about what he's trying to do, about the strategies he uses to avoid making conventional pictures. Most of all, we see him struggling with real life in all its ordinary strangeness. He breaks off frequently during the interview to make new photographs. He seems compelled to photograph everything, to see how it might look as a photograph. He once famously said:
There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described.
— Garry Winogrand
Unlike the other arts, that begin with a blank canvas or an empty stage, photography begins with the world. The job of the photographer, it might be argued, is to select rectangular or square sections of reality, in the form of reflected light, to stop and fix forever. Choosing where to put your body, what to include, what to exclude and when to click the shutter are very different processes to those used by artists in other fields.
Some initial questions:
- In what sense can a "fact clearly described" be "mysterious"?
- Do photographs document or create reality?
- What is the difference between a construction and a disclosure?
- How is photography similar to other forms of art? How is it different?
- How do photographs change our relationships to things?
John Baldessari (photo by Shunk-Kender) - Hands Framing New York Harbour, 1971
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Framing a viewIn 1971, artist and curator Willoughby Sharp invited 27 artists, including John Baldessari, to create ephemeral artworks on a derelict pier in New York harbour. The photographers Harry Shunk and Janos Kender documented the projects. On the pier, Baldessari used his hands to mimic the view of their camera, emphasising the framing choices made by the photographers.
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Putting aside the issue of whose work of art this is, Baldessari's or Shunk and Kender's, the image neatly presents one of the key issues in photography - where to place the edges. This photograph presents a frame within a frame. Imagine if Baldessari had moved his hands a few centimetres in any direction. Is the intended picture of the boat inherently more interesting than the architecture, the water lapping against the pier, the sign?
Photographers make choices. This; not that. Photographs are the results of those choices.
Photographers make choices. This; not that. Photographs are the results of those choices.
Take a careful look at the photographs below. Think about where each photographer has decided to place the edges, what he or she has decided to include in and exclude from the frame. What choices has s/he made?
Photography is a system of visual editing. At bottom, it is a matter of surrounding with a frame a portion of one's cone of vision, while standing in the right place at the right time. Like chess, or writing, it is a matter of choosing from among given possibilities, but in the case of photography the number of possibilities is not finite but infinite.
— John Szarkowski
To crop or not to crop
Cropping is different to framing. Framing is what you do when you take the picture, working out what to include and what to exclude. Cropping happens later, either in the darkroom during enlarging and printing, or in digital editing software.
Henri Cartier-Bresson - Bullring, Valencia, Spain, 1933
Henri Cartier-Bresson carefully framed his photographs but believed strongly that photographs should not be cropped in the darkroom.
Interviewer: You’ve been known for never cropping your photos. Do you want to say anything about that?
HCB: About cropping? [...] I will get closer, or further, there’s an emphasis on the subject, and if the relations, the interplay of lines is correct, well, it is there. If it’s not correct it’s not by cropping in the darkroom and making all sorts of tricks that you improve it. If a picture is mediocre, well it remains mediocre. The thing is done, once for all.
This approach is often referred to as the Decisive Moment, after the English title of his famous book. His prints feature a black border (see above) to indicate the edge of the negative, proof that no cropping has taken place.
However, lots of other photographs are routinely cropped, especially those that appear in newspapers and magazines, often accompanied by words.
However, lots of other photographs are routinely cropped, especially those that appear in newspapers and magazines, often accompanied by words.
John Hillard - Cause of Death, 1974
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Take a look at John Hilliard's 'Cause of Death' (above right). We are presented with four images featuring what looks like a dead body. The death appears to have four separate causes: Crushed, Drowned, Burned, Fell. However, we soon realise that the body is identical in all four pictures. The image below shows how Hilliard cropped a single photograph, in four ways, to tell four different stories. For much of its history, photography was seen as a kind of evidence, proof that something had happened (you could refer to TC2 and the notion of an index or trace). Hilliard is interested in the ways photographs can be used to provide unreliable evidence, to tell lies and deceive. They do this by only ever showing us part of the whole truth.
Some suggested activities:Modern cameras often have either one electronic viewfinder (a screen at the back of the camera which doubles as an interface) or two viewfinders (electronic and optical). There is a difference between composing a shot with your eye pressed to an optical viewfinder and using an EVF. The purpose of the following activities is to foreground the process of looking, framing and composing a shot without the aid of camera.
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The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
— Susan Sontag
- Give students a 6x4 inch piece of white card. Tell them they have only one 'shot' available. Ask them to consider what they would like to capture and (possibly with the aid of a viewfinder) commit the scene to memory through careful looking. Then, ask them to make a sketch of their chosen subject, trying to remember the specific arrangement of forms and shapes, the proportions of objects, dominant lines, the distribution of space within the composition etc.
- A further activity might compare framing a view with cropping afterwards. Students could be asked to crop a chosen image (in the darkroom or digitally) in several different ways, thus creating alternative compositions and, possibly, different stories (like the John Hilliard image above).
Remember, not everything is a picture. A good eye can edit before the shutter opens.
— Craig Coverdale
Objective/Subjective framing
Consider these two photographs:
Bernd and Hilla Becher - Water Towers
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Minor White - Vicinity of Danville, New York, 1955
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In photography you can never express yourself directly, only through optics, the physical and chemical processes. It is this sort of submission to the object and abnegation of yourself that is exactly what pleases me about photography. What is extraordinary is that, despite this submission and abnegation, the personality of the photographer shines through all the obstacles. In the end, images convey personality just as strongly as in a drawing.
— Brassai
Brassai seems to suggest in this statement that all photographs contain elements of objectivity and subjectivity, that despite the inherent objectivity of the photographic tools and processes, the personality of the photographer is bound to reveal itself in the final image. This relationship is clearly affected by the choices a photographer makes about framing the subject.
In terms of the way these subjects (above) have been framed by the camera, where would you place them on a scale from subjective to objective? What about other photographs you know and admire? What about your own images? What helped you to decide where the photographs should be placed?
In terms of the way these subjects (above) have been framed by the camera, where would you place them on a scale from subjective to objective? What about other photographs you know and admire? What about your own images? What helped you to decide where the photographs should be placed?
A room with a viewWindows provide us with a ready-made frame. A photograph of a window could be considered a frame within a frame. Several photographers have explored this visual pun.
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Shizuka Yokomizo - Untitled (from the series Stranger) 1998–2000
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Dear Stranger, I am an artist working on a photographic project which involves people I do not know…I would like to take a photograph of you standing in your front room from the street in the evening. A camera will be set outside the window on the street. If you do not mind being photographed, please stand in the room and look into the camera through the window for 10 minutes on __-__-__ (date and time) … I will take your picture and then leave…we will remain strangers to each other…If you do not want to get involved, please simply draw your curtains to show your refusal … I really hope to see you from the window.
— Shizuka Yokomizo, 'Stranger' project
Here's a slightly different way of looking at framing and windows in the context of film. Hitchcock was a master of composition and in 'Rear Window' his hero is a documentary photographer played by James Stewart. This short commentary of the opening minutes of the film makes the point that Hitchcock uses the motif of the window within a window to help tell the story. In feature films like this, projected at the cinema, we are seeing 24 individual photographic frames presented every second. This gives the illusion of continuous movement. The artist Douglas Gordon reveals the careful framing decisions made by Hitchcock in '24 hour Psycho', a version of the famous film dramatically slowed down to 2 frames per second so that every directorial decision is visible.
