Intentional omission is as good as not existing. This is both an important storytelling tool as well as a visually balancing one.įinally, we have the obvious: if it isn’t in the frame, there’s no way the audience can know it was there. It is the spatial relationship between not just the elements within the frame but the frame itself that has implications on causality and story: forced empty space in the center of the frame suggests deliberate avoidance proximity suggests collaboration. What you see in a photograph is all you get: and there is an implied limitation to the composition delineated by the edges of the frame that forces the viewer to consider only what lies within it. Spatial arrangement is more complex: our perception of the real world does not enjoy hard boundaries, which means that there is no real ‘frame’ and you can always turn your head to get additional context, or move the camera angle to get a second point of reference. We simply do not have enough information to match what it is we’re seeing with our visual memory bank. This may be achieved through size, light or depth of field – if something is so small as to be insignificant, you won’t notice it or be able to see sufficient detail to know what you’re looking at if it’s dark there are no visible textures or details if it’s out of focus then the optical system cannot resolve sufficiently high frequency structures. The first is simple: if you cannot see it, there’s no way you can know for sure an object is there. There are three aspects to consider and control here: resolving power, spatial arrangement and conscious exclusion.
How then, is it possible to make a photograph that is ambiguous? *Ignoring distortion – but even then, except for fisheyes, the distortion is relatively minor and does not affect the overall impression of proportion. We can therefore say this is the defining characteristic of a photograph: it is a recognisable and relatively linear representation of reality, both in spatial arrangement and luminosity. Even if we use lenses that do not match ‘natural’ human eye perspectives, the difference in foreground-to-background proportion is always consistent and predictable. This is clearly not the same as an interpretative representation like a painting, where that line may be drawn 1/2 way up, or 3/4s of the way up, or not even exist – and the subject may still be recognisable because it is not a necessary defining characteristic. The relative spatial relationship between elements of the subject will remain the same – if the real object has a line at 2/3rds of its height, then there will be a line at 2/3rds of its height in the image*. In its simplest form, a properly-focused lens will project a scaled image of the subject onto the focal plane. But then how can we use ambiguity to our advantage to make a stronger image?Ī literal image: you would not think to be looking at anything other than trees. The resultant image has to obey the laws of physics, after all – and these are generally quite consistent. (There’s a third kind, which you cannot really classify into either because they are lacking something fundamental like a clear subject – these land up as being ambiguous by default, but not intentionally.) From an interpretative/ artistic standpoint, a photograph is perhaps the most literal of all art forms assuming minimal postprocessing, the translation between reality and finished interpretation is predictable and consistent across all subjects and capture conditions.
I believe good photographs can be divided into two camps: the literal and the ambiguous.