21

Where Does the Eye Go?

EVERY ELEMENT IN THE FRAME pulls the eye to one degree or another. If we’ve been aware and intentional about where those elements are placed, then the eye of the reader has a journey ahead. Where the eye goes, how it gets there, and in what order all have an effect on how we read the photograph. And as much as we talk about where the eye goes, it is more a matter of where the mind goes; specifically, to what is our attention drawn?

As far as I can tell, it was my friend and photographer John Paul Caponigro who said, “There is a vast difference between focusing the lens and focusing our attention.” If I’m wrong about that, then it is certainly the kind of thing he might have said, and the kind of thing I would nod my head at and shamelessly misquote in one of my books. The idea resonates strongly with me—I think that’s because we spend so much time and effort talking about how we focus our optics and we obsess over the sharpness of those same optics, but then we become very sloppy indeed when it comes to making choices that direct the attention of the viewer within the image itself.

In Chapter 20, we discussed this very thing, though in terms of isolation and exclusion. I want to elaborate on that important discussion by adding a further notion: the path of the eye. If you only make images in which there is a single element right in the middle of the frame and with very little space around it, not only are you likely going to have boring images (though I’m open to being proven wrong about this), but you will also have no use for this conversation. The viewer’s eye will go to that single element and stay there. The rest of us who tend to rely on several elements to, for example, tell a story, provide counterbalance or tension, or create contrast need to consider how the eye moves among those elements and around the frame itself.

To consider this at all, you need to have a sense of visual mass. If you understand what elements the eye goes to first, second, third, and so on, you can plot points on the journey that the eye takes. No photographer I know would think quite so analytically about this, but if asked, most of us could trace our finger along a photograph and say, “My eye goes here, then there, and then here again.” Doing so with photographs you admire is a good visual literacy exercise.

The question we need to ask is this: “Is that where I intend the eye to go?” From there, other questions and considerations make themselves available:

• Does the path of the eye imply certain relationships?
• Does that path take me around the frame or into the depth of the image, or does it lead me out of the frame, cutting short my reading of the image?
• Is that path a pleasant one that encourages a second or third reading, or is it frustrated by clutter or a lack of intentional design?
• Does that path possess the kind of energy I want the image to convey (see Chapter 14)?
• Does my attention land on the most important element first, or does it get there quickly?
• Is there a way to trick the eye into thinking the most obvious element is the most important, only to provide a surprise that is less prominent but crucial to understanding or experiencing the image?
• Is it possible that I’ve given too much visual weight to elements that should, in fact, be secondary or tertiary?

I want to remind you that what is important here is the value of the questions themselves. It is not important that you know the answers but that you ask the questions.

Nor is it important that you find only one answer. What’s important is to keep asking and answering the questions by experimentation and a willingness to say, “I don’t know. Let’s find out.” Some of the ideas we’re exploring in this book are not often talked about among photographers, at least not with the kind of enthusiasm or insight that we seem to have about the mechanical tools of their craft.

These questions I’m proposing are questions of discovery designed to help you become more familiar with the other tools of this craft: creativity, composition, storytelling, and an awareness of your own vision and voice. I would argue these are at least as important as the physical tools we hold in our hands, if not more so, and they will not be discovered with the same kind of mathematical, precise approach that our cameras and lenses can be.