27 Interesting Irritations
Reality is often full of things that resist being incorporated into a harmonic pictorial composition. Such things break up a photo and may be precisely what make the image interesting.
The depiction of a harmonic, magical, and unified world was one objective that the famous photographer Ansel Adams pursued in his images. The world he showed in his images had no breaks; all the pictorial elements and means of composition he applied had only one objective, to magically translate the unbroken enchantment of the landscape into a black and white photograph.
Is it still possible to photograph our world in this way? This is an almost philosophical question. Yet, one thing is certain: The world surely has more breaks now than in the times of Ansel Adams, and this makes the representation of an intact world through photography become questionable (see Chapter 7).
The inclusion of breaks in an image surely creates tension. Breaks are frequently used as optically irritating points that force your eye to move through a composition. The classically irritating elements that members of the old photo clubs encountered were the power poles and telephone lines. Photographers in such clubs often said that they almost had to take a pair of scissors so they could photograph unbroken landscapes. Nowadays, it is very easy to remove these irritating elements with Photoshop, but you don’t have to!
1 Frame
2 Backdrop
3 Symmetry axes
Power Lines in San Francisco
The photo in figure 27–1 is almost overgrown by all kinds of power and telephone lines, and yet they intensify the appeal of this urban landscape in San Francisco. The power line tangle has been purposefully included in the pictorial composition to become an inextricable part of the image, but it was essential to at least compose the rest of the photo in an orderly fashion. Thus, I placed the telephone lines in the left and right edges of the photo so they create symmetry. I also gave the pictorial composition a stagelike appearance and a latent pictorial frame consisting of the street below, the two poles on either side, and the lines above, with the sky gradually becoming darker toward the top. The figure placed along the vertical axis of symmetry emphasizes the clear symmetrical order. By using a 200 mm telephoto lens, the skyscraper perspective is so flat that it consists entirely of vertical and horizontal lines, resembling an artificial backdrop behind the man and the tangle of cables. However, without all these lines, the photo would be only half as interesting, although at first glance they appear irritating because they seem to interfere with reality. This image demonstrates how a seemingly irritating element can be successfully integrated.
Irritating Fence
Looking at the photo in figure 27–2, you get the impression of being left out. The fence prevents access to this inviting Coney Island beach. Access is only permitted to the wealthy residents of a gated and exclusive community located right behind the fence. It would have been easier, of course, to photograph the beach through the fence opening, but then the special appeal of the image would have been lost—the viewer looks yearningly through the opening of the fence to a lovely, backlit beach while simultaneously coming to the conclusion that there is no way to slip through the narrow gap. As I have mentioned, ships and boats were used by the Old Masters in their canvases to symbolize yearning, and a ship invoking that feeling is seen moving past the locked opening. Though very small, the ship is exactly in the middle of the picture and is therefore immediately noticed. In this image characterized by a folding symmetrical composition, the horizon lies on the horizontal axis of symmetry. The sky of this photo was subsequently darkened toward the top in the darkroom giving the image a “roof,” thus intensifying the effect of sunlight.
This photo was taken with an analog camera and a 20 mm wide-angle lens.
Surreal Cemetery
One of the stylistic media of surrealism is to bring together things that, in reality, are not related to each other. What is a concrete mixer doing in a cemetery? Well, apparently cemeteries must also be expanded; nevertheless this element is an extraneous structure and therefore acts as a break. The cemetery remains intact only in the lower part of the image. The empty rows in the “third story” look unreal. The deep black conveys a strange spell. If the lower part of the image shows harmony, the upper part radiates something threatening, stressed by the blackness of the coffin openings and the sky.
Once again, I had to consciously decide whether or not to include the irritating concrete mixer in the composition.
The photo was taken with an analog Mamiya 645 and a 35 mm wide-angle lens (which corresponds approximately to 21 mm in small format), and a red filter was used to darken the sky considerably.
Mysterious Lighting Spectacle
The photo in figure 27–4, taken in the northern half of La Palma in the Canary Islands, should have shown an unbroken landscape with rising backlit clouds, but that was difficult to accomplish. To show only the trees enveloped in sun and fog would have been somewhat of a cliché, and I would have needed a longer telephoto lens than the available 210 mm telephoto (135 mm in small format) of my Mamiya 645 medium-format camera. All I could do, then, was to incorporate the seemingly irritating stop sign into the composition. In the small photo (figure 27–5), the composition is still not perfect, but when the tree is mysteriously veiled by the clouds, the composition is indeed perfect. The veiled play of light seems almost otherworldly, so the stop sign brings the photo once again “down to earth” and, to a certain extent, attests that this light show is occurring in this world after all.
The gray values were equalized by such extremely precise partial exposures in the darkroom that they reproduce exactly the right mood.
