The Steerage Redux

Here is a photograph by Alfred Stieglitz, which I have examined before in these pages.



I suggested previously that it was something of a rule follower, which it is to an extent. Understood in terms of classical composition rather than modern photographic "composition", though, it completely falls into place. The excellence is immediately understood as a consequence of the photo's adherence to visual ideas that we simply work. The "rule of thirds" has nothing to do with it.

There are many lines in the picture, none of them quite parallel, and none of them quite perpendicular, but certainly grouped into more-or-less vertical, and more-or-less horizontal. The lines give interest and a sense of regularity without being tedious and repetitious. There is a bright white spot in the hat, and a sightline from the white-hatted man down to black-headed figures in the steerage connecting that light spot to the darker spots below. There is a light region, contrasting with a dark region. There are spots of light and dark in echoed configurations. There is even a strongly pyramidal collection in the darker mass of the steerage topped by the man in the white hat.

Viewed as a nineteenth century painting, this thing is practically textbook (except for the subject matter).

The point here is that there are a bunch of elements which we recognize after the fact as being part of many successful compositions, and they have been applied here with excellent taste and balance. There is variety, and there is unity. There is visual balance. You can't really measure these things, but you can see them when they are present, and you can to a degree learn to apply them yourself. There is no royal road to a good composition, but there are some signposts, some blazes on the trail.

Ultimately, you simply have to learn to see it yourself by looking at a bunch of pictures, and to do it yourself by taking a lot of pictures, mostly bad.

Famous Photo of the week

The Steerage, Stieglitz.

As a composition, this is divided in two top to bottom. The upper mass of people is neatly framed by various objects and lines, centering your attention on the white hat. The man's face and hand, if not the actual hat, is placed at about 1/3 of the way down the frame (rule of thirds!) while the various linear objects in-frame give more or less strong diagonals, especially the gangplank. The implied line of sight from the man in the white hat could be considered to be interrupted by the gangplank, but I think one can argue convincingly that it passes behind the gangplank , down into the second mass of people (the ones in Steerage).
The relative tidiness of the framing above contrasts with the relative untidiness below, arguably echoing in the composition the contrast between the two classes of people involved, although this might be a bit of a stretch.
As a composition, I think this one is fair rule-following, as far as the simple rules of composition we run in to over and over. It is a particularly fortuitous arrangement of shapes and lines, a little random to be formal as such, but while it's loose I think it's pretty obedient to convention.
Of course the point of this image is, as is so often with the really good ones, essentially political.

Famous Photos

A commenter, my friend mjr, pointed me at this theme. Let's look at famous photographs, and see how they stack up against the formal "rules". My plan here is to pick out some photo I know and like, without consciously thinking much about how it's going to stack up, plug it in to a post, and start writing what I see.

Of course all of there things have been analyzed to death, but I haven't done it, and it hasn't been done from my point of view. Perhaps I'll learn something. Perhaps you will too!

The rule of thirds seems to apply here, roughly, although the visual center is little high and right to really fall on a 1/3 ruling. The best you could argue here is that the heart of the image starts on a 1/3 x 1/3 position, and proceeds from there to the edges of the frame. The gaze of the mother is anything but across the frame, there is no room at all in the frame for the line of her gaze. This might be ok, since the gaze is clearly on her daughter's face, so that "line" naturally terminates.

Eye-leading is a little vague, there are strong graphical lines, all leading to and from the wrong places. You could argue that diamond of lines making up the edges of the bath form a frame (and in fact, I think they do). The only strong leading lines are the very short mother's gaze, and the line of the girl's body horizontally across the center of the frame. The girl's gaze is straight up, to nothing and then out of frame, another rotten line.

The shadows are printed down to very very dark (although it's possible that texture remains in a good print), the contrast is extreme, the skin tones are not very pleasing. The light is harsh and unflattering.

I think a reasonable point could be made that there are two images here. There's a portrait of a mother and daughter contained in the upper right corner, and then there's the entire image providing a moderately gruesome context for the portrait.

Here we have Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath, shot by W. Eugene Smith in the 1970s, in Minamata, Japan. In terms of actual changes wrought on the world by a photograph, this comes very near the top. It is, by any meaningful measure, an extremely important photograph