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Where Is the Contrast?

CONTRAST IS ABOUT DIFFERENCE. The way tones or colours differ from one another—that’s contrast. But so, too, is the way lines or shapes differ. You can even have contrasting ideas. When you place a newborn baby in the hands of a grandfather, you create contrast. When you place a small human in a vast building, that is contrast. It’s actually several contrasts, including a contrast of human versus architectural, and small versus large. The degree of success that contrast achieves in drawing our eye and making us pay attention to a photograph comes from the amount of difference between the elements. Yellow contrasted with orange might be a little too subtle to make you look twice, but yellow with blue is a contrast with strong visual mass, so we pay attention to it. If you want to draw attention to an image, or to elements within an image, creating strong contrasts is a good start.

Many of the images I’ve seen as I’ve worked with younger photographers leave me wondering exactly what they want me to be looking at. The subject is unclear. A sea of faces in a crowd, everyone wearing the same clothes, the same expression, and looking the same way, won’t likely elicit a response from me. Where do you want me to look? What’s interesting here? But give one of those faces a different expression, or give one person different clothes, and by those contrasts you’ve given me something to consider. Now I know what you’re showing me.

Contrast done well can also help carry the meaning in an image. It can help establish or comment on an idea. Photographers exploring the fine art nude genre have used this to good effect for decades. When you put a light-skinned nude woman among large black rocks or towering cacti, you are pointing out certain qualities of the female form by showing us what it is not. The woman’s skin seems lighter by being surrounded by the dark rocks. It seems softer, her form more sensual, her curves more organic, and in contrast to the cacti, she seems more vulnerable.

Because contrast focuses our attention on difference, it can be used to raise questions and point to incongruences that we find amusing, or heartbreaking. Elliott Erwitt, whom I have long held up as one of my favourite photographers of this century, is a master of using juxtaposition to create something like a visual pun or gag. Naked painters at their easels painting a fully dressed model, for example. An art gallery in which a single woman admires a painting of a fully dressed woman, while a dozen men stand ogling a painting of a naked woman. A small dog dwarfed by the legs of a dog so large we can see nothing but those legs.