FOREWORD

“Photography” is a big word. I wonder if Sir John Herschel could have imagined that the term would grow to encompass such a vast range of uses, processes, media, and intentions when he popularized it in 1839. From the beginning, our beloved “painting with light” was diverse and ever changing, and it has grown into a spectrum that spans art, documentary, family snapshots, advertising, pornography, scientific research, and a thousand gradations and variations in between. It includes nearly a hundred distinct photographic processes (so far!), ranging from daguerreotype to Hipstamatic, and is presented on an impossibly wide array of media and substrates, including glass, metal, paper, and LCD, to name just a few.

So how do we make sense of all this potentiality? How do we provide an effective framework for photographers to investigate these worlds without getting lost or distracted by photographic “politics”? Why debate the virtue of one technique over another—daguerreotype versus ambrotype, platinum print versus silver, film versus digital—when the real question is, how can we learn to use the camera as what Minor White called “a metamorphosing machine”? How do we make images that take advantage of the elegant and universally understood visual syntax we share as humans to create something beautiful—such as songs, poems, and stories in photographs—or show others things we have seen, or manifest our dreams on paper?

You teach people to fish. I love this book because it gets us thinking about “why to” rather than “how to.” Naturally, the book includes plenty of practical information (and wonderful examples to illustrate the text), but more important, it delves into the thinking process that underlies the making of all good photographs. By emphasizing four immutable elements, derived from and rooted in the biological hard wiring of human perception, The Elements of Photography provides a timeless structure—a practical framework for exploring photography, regardless of process or technique. This book not only accommodates but also embraces the fact that cameras, darkrooms, and software are constantly changing, so step-by-step tutorials inevitably fail. Understanding how to redirect attention with light, focus, and geometry, however, is a completely non-version-specific form of visual alchemy.

Angela Faris Belt has done a beautiful job of providing workable instructions for practicing this kind of photographic magic by distilling more than a century of hard-won photographic wisdom into a couple of hundred pages. She focuses, literally, on the big picture: teaching photographers how to analyze and deconstruct the building blocks of photographs in order to develop the critical skills necessary to evaluate and improve their work, and find their own style. She provides a starting point for exploring pictures, and a way for photographers to begin to train themselves to see each successful or unsuccessful picture as the result of numerous distinct and conscious choices, rather than a single intuitive leap. It has taken me the better part of three decades to understand what it means for a picture to work on every level—why some pictures are great, while others “almost” work. This book expedites that process by helping photographers figure out what, exactly, might be missing from their pictures, and what to do about it. Once we understand that, the sky’s the limit.

Jean Miele

© Jean Miele. November 3, 2010. All Rights Reserved.