Lesson 56. Simplify

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said, “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” The same applies beautifully to the photograph. Elegance is about simplicity, about the removal of everything unnecessary to the telling of the story or the expression of emotion. Pulling everything extraneous from the frame, or forbidding it to go there in the first place, allows the necessary elements to play their strongest.

Image

Fuji XE-1, 14mm, 240 seconds @ f/11, ISO 250
Twilight over the sea in Liguria, Italy, is reduced to its simplest elements with careful composition and a long exposure.

Image

Fuji X-T1, 56mm, 1/4s @ f/16, ISO 200
Hokkaido, Japan, 2015. Compositions don’t get much simpler than this, though that doesn’t mean you just point and shoot. I visited this spot over three days and only once did I get this kind of isolation due to the weather and the fresh snow.

Trying to include more in the frame, which can ask more of the photograph than it’s able to communicate, only weakens it. It’s better to create three powerful, elegant frames than one that is cluttered and suffers from so much dilution that the reader of the photograph doesn’t know what you’re pointing at.

I’m not suggesting you make your photographs so clear that they suggest no mystery. On the contrary, mystery is best created by what you do not show—another argument for simpler images. Consider these questions:

• How much can you take out of the frame with the isolation techniques you learned earlier?

• Can you further simplify the background, giving a little less information and a little more impact?

• Can you change your point of view in order to shift some strong lines and give them less energy in order to let other elements play more powerfully?

• Does pulling color out, or diminishing the saturation a little, simplify the frame in a way that gives you a stronger image?

• How can you break this one scene into three or four photographs, each a little stronger than the scene as a whole because each speaks to something different, in a different way?

Your Assignment

Find a scene that pulls at you and make a photograph the way you normally might. Don’t think too much about it. Now find the “photographs within a photograph” and make six simpler photographs. They don’t have to tell the whole story; in fact, that’s the point. It doesn’t have to be a large scene either. Pick a vase of flowers, make a photograph of that vase of flowers, and then simplify—find six photographs within that scene that are less busy, more about line and color and pattern. Make the simplest photographs you can. Exclude everything that is unnecessary. Can you make one photograph of only a stem, or an abstract of defocused petals, eliminating even the need for sharp focus? Can you reduce the color palette to only different shades of red or green? Can you find a way to remove the color entirely? How much can you remove before you no longer have a photograph?

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