Threshold Concept #8

Each Threshold Concept has a supporting image inspired by our Photopedagogy camera. TC #8 shows a book - a dictionary, reference text or creative manual perhaps - with a shutter button marking a key page.

Threshold Concept #8

Photographs have formal properties that shape how we see. Some of these properties are specific to the medium itself: the frame, focus, flatness, frozen time. Understanding these helps us read photographs more critically, but formal analysis is a tool, not a complete method.

Photographers have to impose order, bring structure to what they photograph. It is inevitable. A photograph without structure is like a sentence without grammar -- it is incomprehensible, even inconceivable.

— Stephen Shore

When Stephen Shore compares photographs to sentences, he's not suggesting that photography works exactly like language. Photographs don't have words or syntax. But every photograph makes choices, whether the photographer is conscious of them or not. Where does the frame fall? What's in focus? What moment is captured? These aren't optional, they're built into how cameras work. To photograph is to impose structure.

Some formal concerns are shared across visual media: line, shape, colour, texture, composition. These have been taught in art schools since the early twentieth century, when educators at the Bauhaus in Germany developed a vocabulary for analysing visual design. But it's worth noting that this vocabulary emerged from a particular time and place. It reflects the concerns of European modernism and doesn't necessarily translate to all visual traditions across cultures and history. When we use terms like "balance" or "harmony," we're often applying assumptions that deserve questioning.

Photography, however, has properties that belong to the medium itself:

Frame: Every photograph has edges. Decisions about what to include and exclude, and where those boundaries fall, fundamentally shape meaning.
Flatness: Photographs translate a three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional surface. This flattening affects how we perceive space, depth, and the relationships between objects.
Time: Photographs freeze moments. The choice of shutter speed determines whether movement appears sharp or blurred, whether time seems suspended or stretched.
Focus: What's sharp draws attention; what's soft recedes. Depth of field creates hierarchies within the image.
Vantage point: The camera was somewhere. The angle, distance, and height from which a photograph is made shapes our relationship to the subject.
Light: Unlike painters who depict light, photographers capture it. The quality, direction, and intensity of light at the moment of exposure is recorded, not invented.

Even the most casual snapshot has a frame, a moment, a point of view.

In the mid-twentieth century, formalist criticism dominated discussions of photography. Critics focused almost exclusively on how images were composed, often ignoring what they depicted or meant. This approach has come to seem limited. As we explored in TC#7, photographs aren't neutral windows onto the world. They carry ideologies, encode power relations, and circulate in contexts that shape their meaning. Formal analysis alone cannot account for these complexities. However, understanding how photographs organise visual information remains valuable. When we notice that a camera angle looks up at a subject, we can ask why, and consider how that choice shapes our perception of power. When we see that a photograph uses shallow focus to isolate a face from its surroundings, we can think about what that separation does to meaning. Formal awareness becomes a starting point for critical thinking, not an end in itself.

The comparison between photography and language is useful but imperfect. Roland Barthes, the French theorist who pioneered the analysis of photographs as sign systems, argued that at one level, photographs are "messages without a code". We recognise what's in them without needing to learn a special language. But photographs also carry connotations, secondary meanings that are culturally learned. For example, the conventions of portraiture, the visual language of advertising, the associations triggered by black-and-white versus colour, are not universal but specific to times, places and communities. Perhaps it's better to think of photographs as having conventions, shared practices that can be understood, questioned and broken. When students learn to read these conventions, and to recognise when photographers work with or against them, they develop the critical visual literacy that photography education aims to foster.

Rather than hunting for formal elements as if completing a checklist (Where are the leading lines? Does this follow the Rule of Thirds?), we might ask:

What choices has the photographer made about frame, focus, time, and vantage point?
How do these choices shape what we notice and how we feel?
What conventions is the photograph drawing on — or resisting?
What do these formal decisions do in relation to the photograph's subject and context?

Formal analysis is one tool among many. It helps us attend to how photographs work, but it needs to be combined with attention to what they depict, where they circulate, and whose interests they serve.

Properties specific to photography

These are the unavoidable choices that any photograph makes. They arise from how cameras work and cannot be avoided, only managed — consciously or unconsciously.

Frame
Every photograph has edges. The frame determines what is included and what is left out — and where those boundaries fall in relation to the subject. Unlike paintings, where the artist builds outward from a blank surface, photographs are carved from a larger visual field. The world continues beyond the frame; we know there is an outside.

Questions to ask: What has been included? What might be just outside the frame? Do the edges cut through objects or figures? Does the framing feel deliberate and considered, or spontaneous and contingent? How tight or loose is the framing — does it crowd the subject or give it space? What would change if the frame were different?

Focus and depth of field
Optical focus directs attention. What is sharp appears to matter; what falls soft recedes. Depth of field (how much of the image is in focus from near to far) shapes how we experience space. A shallow depth of field isolates a subject from its surroundings; a deep depth of field holds everything in equal clarity.

Questions to ask: What is in focus? What is soft or blurred? Does the focus draw your eye to a particular part of the image? How does depth of field affect the relationship between subject and background? Is the focus precise and controlled, or rough and approximate? Does anything important fall outside the zone of sharpness?

Time
Photographs freeze moments. The choice of when to press the shutter, and how long to leave it open, determines what kind of time the photograph holds. A fast shutter speed arrests motion, creating a world that never quite existed — a splash of water suspended in mid-air. A slow shutter speed allows time to blur and accumulate — figures become ghosts, lights become trails.

Questions to ask: Does movement appear frozen or blurred? Does the photograph feel like a decisive moment or an arbitrary slice of time? What happened just before and just after? Is there a sense of duration within the image? How does the treatment of time affect the mood or meaning?

Vantage point
The camera was somewhere. It occupied a position in space, a specific height, distance, and angle in relation to the subject. This vantage point shapes our relationship to what we see. A low angle can make a subject appear powerful or monumental; a high angle can diminish or survey. Distance creates intimacy or detachment.

Questions to ask: Where was the camera positioned? Are we looking up, down, or straight on? How far are we from the subject? Does the vantage point feel natural or strange? What does this position imply about the photographer's relationship to the subject? Could the photograph have been made from elsewhere, and what would change?

Light (as captured)
Unlike painters, who depict light through marks and pigments, photographers capture light as it exists (or is arranged) at the moment of exposure. The quality, direction, intensity, and colour of light are recorded, not invented. This gives photographs their particular relationship to specific times and places.

Questions to ask: What kind of light is this: hard or soft, natural or artificial, direct or reflected? Where is the light coming from? What shadows are created, and what do they reveal or conceal? Does the light feel incidental (as found) or deliberate (as arranged)? How does the light affect mood, atmosphere, or the visibility of detail?

Visual elements shared with other media

These elements are not unique to photography. They appear in painting, drawing, design, and other visual forms. However, they work differently in photographs because they are captured from the world rather than constructed from scratch. A line in a photograph is usually a line that existed; a shape is usually the shape of something.

Tone and value
The range from light to dark. In black-and-white photography, tone is the full spectrum of greys that describe form, space, and atmosphere. In colour photography, tonal relationships still matter, underpinning how we perceive depth and volume.

Questions to ask: Is there a full range of tones from black to white, or is the image compressed into a narrower range? Where are the darkest and lightest areas? Does the image tend toward brightness (high key) or darkness (low key)? How does the distribution of tones guide your eye through the image?

Colour
When present, colour carries both descriptive and expressive weight. It can be vivid or muted, warm or cool, harmonious or discordant. Colour in photographs is often "found" (what was there) but photographers make choices about how to render it through exposure, film stock, white balance and processing.

Questions to ask: What colours dominate? Are they saturated or subdued? Is there a colour palette or do colours feel random? How does colour contribute to mood? What would be lost (or gained) if this image were black and white? Are the colours "natural" or have they been processed or manipulated?

Texture
Photographs can describe surface texture with remarkable precision. Texture becomes most visible when light rakes across surfaces at an angle, creating tiny shadows that reveal the topography of materials.

Questions to ask: Can you sense how surfaces would feel? What textures are emphasised by the direction of light? Do contrasting textures create visual interest or meaning? Is texture descriptive (telling us about materials) or expressive (contributing to mood)?

Line
Lines in photographs are usually the edges of things, where one surface meets another, where a form ends and space begins. But some photographs emphasise line as a compositional force: roads leading into the distance, the horizon dividing earth from sky.

Questions to ask: Are there strong linear elements? Are they straight or curved, horizontal, vertical, or diagonal? Do lines lead your eye in particular directions? Do they suggest movement, stability, or tension? Are lines created by actual objects, or by the edges where tones or colours meet?

Shape
Shapes in photographs are usually the shapes of things: bodies, buildings, objects, shadows etc. But photography's capacity to flatten three-dimensional space into two dimensions can emphasise shapes as graphic elements, especially when strong light creates silhouettes or when subjects are seen against plain backgrounds.

Questions to ask: What shapes are prominent? Are they geometric (angular, regular) or organic (curved, irregular)? Do shapes overlap, creating spatial relationships? Are there echoes or contrasts between shapes? Does the flattening of space turn three-dimensional forms into two-dimensional shapes?

Space and depth
Photographs translate three-dimensional space onto a flat surface. Various visual cues suggest depth: diminishing size, converging lines, overlapping forms, atmospheric haze, and the fall-off of focus. But photographs can also emphasise flatness, compressing space into pattern.

Questions to ask: Does the photograph create a strong sense of depth, or does it feel flat? What cues suggest spatial recession: perspective, overlap, scale change, atmospheric effects? Is there a clear foreground, middle ground, and background? How does the depth of field affect the sense of space? Are there negative (empty) spaces, and how do they function?

Repetition and pattern
When similar elements recur across the frame, they create rhythm and pattern. This can produce visual pleasure, suggest order or monotony, or draw attention to the one element that breaks the pattern. Photography is particularly good at finding pattern in the world, in architecture, crowds, landscapes and everyday objects.

Questions to ask: Are there repeated elements? Do they create a regular rhythm or a more complex variation? Does the repetition suggest order, abundance, sameness, or something else? Is there a break in the pattern, and if so, what does that disruption do?

A note on "composition" and "rules"

You may have encountered concepts like the Rule of Thirds, leading lines, symmetry, or the golden ratio. These are compositional conventions, ways of organising visual elements that have been found to be effective in certain contexts. They are not laws of nature.

The Rule of Thirds, for example, suggests placing important elements along imaginary lines dividing the frame into thirds. Many successful photographs follow this pattern, and some ignore it entirely. The problem arises when "rules" are applied mechanically, as if photography were a formula to be followed. Knowing the conventions helps you recognise when photographers are working with them or against them. It does not tell you what makes a photograph meaningful.

A better question than "Does this follow the rules?" might be: "How has this photographer organised the elements within the frame, and what does that organisation do?"

The 'grammar' of photographs

The distinction between formal elements shared by most visual images and the specific 'grammar' of photography is asserted by Stephen Shore in his wonderful book The Nature of Photographs. With a comparison between painting and photography we encountered in TC#4, Shore explains:

Photography is inherently an analytic discipline. Where a painter starts with a blank canvas and builds a picture, a photographer starts with the messiness of the world and selects a picture [...] He or she imposes this order by choosing a vantage point, choosing a frame, choosing a moment of exposure, and by selecting a plane of focus.

This is what Shore refers to as the Depictive Level of the photograph. Hence, he defines four ways in which the world is transformed by the camera into a photograph: flatness, frame, time and focus.

These four attributes define the picture's depictive content and structure. They form the basis of a photography's visual grammar. They are responsible for a snapshooter's 'mistakes': a blur, a beheading, a jumble, an awkward moment. They are the means by which photographers express their sense of the world, give structure to their perceptions and articulation to their meanings.

Flatness: photographs are two dimensional. The three dimensional world is projected onto this flat surface. Things separate in the world can be brought into relationship when flattened (TC#5)

Frame: photographs, unlike the world, have edges. The content of the photograph is contained by and relates to the surrounding edges. (TC#4)

Time: the flow of time in the world is interrupted by the photograph. A photograph contains a 'parcel of time' that has cut across the grain of life. (TC#10)

Focus: a photograph contains a plane of focus that can be shallow or deep. Focus can help to draw attention to the subject of the photograph as distinct from its content.

Suggested activities:

Provide a range of photographic images (some are included below) for students to analyse in terms of the Formal or Visual Elements. This is often best done in small groups. Each photograph can be stuck in the middle of a large sheet of paper and Element headings placed around it. The group can then collectively interrogate the picture, annotating as they go. Groups could also rotate around the room, adding to the annotations of the previous groups.
Once the class has had some practice analysing photographs in groups, give each individual student an image to interrogate again using the Elements headings.
Briefly explain Stephen Shore's concept of the 'grammar' of photographs. What so we understand by the notion of grammar in terms of languages? In what sense could photographs be said to have a 'grammar'?
Select a range of photographs and ask students to analyse them in terms of flatness, frame, time and focus.

Practice Makes Perfect

Digital cameras are so sophisticated that they can remove the need to understand and control the way the world is represented. The more students grasp the connection between the camera's settings and the resulting images, the more they are able to choose how their photographs look. Flatness, Time, Frame and Focus are determined by technical as well as aesthetic decisions.

Camera simulation

Understanding the relationship between the settings on your camera and the effect these choices will have on the resulting photograph takes time and practice. Using a camera simulator is a fun way for individual students to experiment and for teachers to demonstrate without the need for class sets of DSLRs!

Depth of Field

Depth of Field (sometimes referred to as DoF) is crucial to the 'grammar' of photography. How much of the image is in focus is determined by the relationship between the various settings you choose on your camera. For example, using the simulator, ask students to experiment in Aperture Priority mode, moving the Aperture slider from left to right (from relatively wide to smaller aperture settings). What happens to the other settings? What happens to the images?

Once students have grasped this basic relationship between aperture, shutter speed and depth of field, they can not only make better sense of the pictures they make but also those they see by others.

Suggested activities:

Practise using a camera simulator to observe the relationship between aperture, shutter speed, ISO etc. Screen grab a series of images generated by different combinations of settings and explain the effects.
Ask students to create a set of photographs for an infographic (like the one below) demonstrating the relationship between (a) aperture and depth of field, and (b) shutter speed and motion blur.

Adapted from this resource

When to say "Yes!"

Achieving the right balance between technical control, instinct, knowledge of the 'rules' and the confidence to break them is a matter of experience. Students today don't need to worry about the expense of developing films. They are able to shoot 100s of photographs in a single afternoon. Other skills then come into play. Which photographs have worked? Which are failures? Which are interesting failures? A thorough understanding of the structure of photographic images can help the student make sense of a potentially enormous body of work. Not all interesting photographs obey the 'rules' but knowing about them can help.

American photographer Henry Wessel is very articulate about the way photographs work. In this short film he describes his working process, one based on the craft of the darkroom, and describes the moment when the photographer says "Yes" with the click of the shutter.

It's very spiritual because you're suddenly seeing the coherence and the inter-connectedness of everything - left to right, top to bottom, front to back. It's all connected and somehow it's in this balance.

— Henry Wessel

At war with the obvious

Following the Second World War, some photographers began to question the prevailing rules about art photography: large cameras, big detailed prints, craftsmanship, fine grain, detail, formal beauty etc. Perhaps beginning with Robert Frank's book The Americans and William Klein's Life is Good and Good for You in New York, Trance Witness Revels ideas about what made great photographs were challenged. A generation of photographers across the world ripped up the rule book and redefined the medium of photography for their own age. William Eggleston is one such photographer who has profoundly influenced how we now feel about photography.

Eggleston developed his own, idiosyncratic rules about making photographs - democratic, only ever taking one picture of one thing, experimenting with unusual framing, aiming the camera like a gun etc.
Photography students are still entranced and puzzled by Eggleston's pictures, often left wondering why they are considered so reverently now. Eggleston absorbed the 'rules' so that he could play with them. In the process he challenged convention, elevated the status of the ordinary and generated new ways to capture bits of the world with a camera.

I am at war with the obvious.

— William Eggleston

Breaking the 'rules'

Rules are made to be broken. Yes, but not knowing the rules renders broken rules as just mistakes. Deliberately breaking the rules, getting things wrong, is a creative choice. Once the rules have been understood, they can be questioned and undermined. The author James Joyce famously eliminated the majority of full stops from the long last chapter of his novel Ulysses but not because he was unfamiliar with the conventions of sentence punctuation. Ivar Gravlejs has had some fun with creating instructions for photographers keen to avoid making obvious mistakes.

Here are some examples of photographers/artists who question some of the 'rules' associated with photography's relationship to the Formal and Visual Elements. In each case, a knowledge of the conventions or 'rules' has informed the photographer's creative choices and helps the viewer make some sense of the resulting pictures.

From Ivar Gravlejs' '78 Photography Rules'

Suggested activities:

Explore the work of the following photographers, considering which 'rules' have been broken in each case. Why might the photographer have chosen to create images which step outside the conventions of photography?
What do we understand by the word 'beauty' in relation to photography? What makes a photograph beautiful? Discuss the extent to which these photographers are concerned with notions of beauty.
Read and discuss the following statement by Saul Leiter. Why might creating photographs that are beautiful be an issue? What type of photography does Leiter characterise as the "ugly school"? What role should photography play in the 21st century?

I must admit that I am not a member of the ugly school. I have a great regard for certain notions of beauty even though to some it is an old fashioned idea. Some photographers think that by taking pictures of human misery, they are addressing a serious problem. I do not think that misery is more profound than happiness.

— Saul Leiter

Bill Armstrong

Armstrong's practice involves re-photographing found images with the focus set to infinity. He is interested in the relationship between fact and fiction.

John Batho

Uta Barth

Batho's unusual compositions and framing draw attention to striking colour combinations which seem to be the real subject of his work.

Barth is fascinated by light. She deliberately questions the traditional role of the camera and asks the viewer to reflect on the process of seeing.

François Fontaine

Akihiko Miyoshi

Fontaine's series Silenzio! Movie Memories presents out of focus photographs of scenes from films shot on film. They explore light, memory and fantasy.

Miyoshi questions our relationship to photographic images, a meeting of pigment and pixels, the intersection of art and technology.