OWI Photo

From the Office of War Information, a portrait.

This is some great stuff here. He's not really looking at us, so we're more immediately aware of the few props and bits of context. His hat is pushed back on his head, is that a style, or did he do that for the photograph? The hat dates the photograph, or at least the subject's sense of style. His shirt suggests a worker, and not a contemporary one.

What's that in the background? Some sort of crane? This could be a dockyard or something, or possibly a mine. I happen to know it's a shipyard, so the crane speaks of things nautical to me, but that might be entirely about foreknowledge.

Positioning the crane right there in the empty space over his shoulder was a stroke of compositional genius, by the way.

The face is excellent. Wrinkled and worn, big droopy nose. He's looking, somewhere, is he thoughtful? Spacing out waiting for the photographer? You can read a lot into his eyes, I think.

Bethlehem-Fairfield shipyards, Baltimore, Maryland. A shipyard worker. Arthur S. Siegel. May, 1943.

The Evolution of Realistic

What looks "real" to the average viewer

HDR aggressively applied looks weird to some of us now, but will it always? Black skies with violently processed fluffy white clouds are the thing, these days, and some people like them. Now, I think these people like them because the effect is eye catching, and they specifically like the effect. Will it some day be normalized, will the over processed look appear normal, so we see only the image, with a lot of visual drama, not the processing?

In any photograph, we're forced to mentally edit out an enormous amount of artifice to see the "real" image, see this post, for instance, and there is no reason to imagine that as new approaches to rendering come along, we will not learn to edit those out as well

There is an Overton Window effect in play here, however. At any given time there is a range, or a general "region" of renderings which will feel natural to the viewing audience. This window does move over time, as any cursory investigation into historical photographs will clearly show. If your goal is to make photographs accessible to your viewers, you should respect that window. The overlooked black skies may soon enter the window, and indeed for some more modern viewers they may be in-window now, but in my judgement the general viewer is still seeing the processing. Rendering skies as pure white, in the style of the 19th century, is also out of the window, albeit the other way. At this point we're pretty much expecting a late Ansel Adams look to the sky, and you can probably push that a bit. But, not too far!

Will violently applied HDR ever enter the window? I cannot help but hope the answer is negative, but the choice is not mine to make.

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

Portraits II

This posting is arguably a continuation of this posting.

Here is a theory I am working my way through, slowly. What I'm interested in here is how, specifically, we view portraits in which the subject is looking at the camera, versus portraits in which they are not.

When the subject of a portrait is looking directly at the camera, the viewer reads this as eye contact. We become, at a monkey-brain level, interested in what the subject is thinking. We imagine their mental state. This is the basis of social interaction, and incidentally we're extremely good at this.

When the subject is looking elsewhere, the viewer reads this as unawareness. We are now observing the subject remotely, we are "spying" a little. This is still about social interaction, but we're less interested in what they're thinking. We're evaluating posture, body language, objects and activities. In simple monkey-brain terms, we're probably making a friend-or-foe evaluation.

Anyways, the upshot of this is that we're more likely to read "mood" and "personality" exclusively when we're looking at an eyes-on-the-camera portrait. We're going to project onto the image some idea of the model's mental state, and we're going to be put off if we can't.

We're more likely to read "story" and "history" when the model is looking away from the camera, especially if there are more cues visible: clothing, actions, body language.

I think this means, among other things, that if your model is not looking at the camera, you need to give the frame more room to breathe, give more space around the model's face. This might be the source of the rule of composition which asserts that you should give space in the direction the model is looking, and is, I think, certainly connected to that rule.

The flip side is that when you're doing an environmental portrait, where the props are surround are important, having the model look aside is often the stronger choice, or at any rate the choice the image simpler to look at.

FSA Photo Of The Week

So many of the scans in the FSA file are like this one, basically kind of shoddy. This is clearly sheet film, so approximately a billion pixels should be available. Nonetheless, ignoring the scan, it's some good work.

This is a strong example of very formal composition. We have the man and a balancing vertical bar placed pretty much exactly on vertical thirds. We have echoed shapes and forms throughout, we have a busy structure on the right/top and a balancing negative space left/bottom. The contrast is high enough to give a visual pop, with pretty much the classical "full range on tones" represented, without it looking weird.

There's some good eye leading, several of the metal bars lead neatly toward the worker's face. He's clearly doing some job, so not only do we have a strong visual center in a graphical sense, that same visual center is where the action is, where your eye wants to be to see what's going on in the photograph.

Ben Bow chromite mill, Stillwater County, Montana. Russell Lee, 1942. Of course it's Russell Lee.

Portraits

The most common casual remark you will about a portrait is that it "really captures the personality" of the subject. This is, taken literally, completely silly. A personality is a big complicated thing, and it's really unlikely that a single image is going to communicate any meaningful subset of it. Add to that: we rarely know the person portrayed, so what on earth does the viewer know about the actual personality of the subject?

As humans we have an enormous amount of mental machinery devoted to understanding a person's mental state and history from their appearance, especially their face. We constantly build mental models of what a person is thinking, based on their expression. A portrait merely needs to tickle this massive mental machine we already have, to set it in motion. The machine will fill in a complete person with a history, a mood, ideas, and personality. Not, of course, the whole thing, but a skeleton our mind can use to understand the subject, a skeleton which we will perceive in the moment as a complete person.

What's really going on is that a good portrait evokes a strong sense of some element of personality and, if the photographer is lucky or skilled, of narrative. The viewer gets the sense that they know the subject, a little, they understand a little of the subject's nature and life. We glean this sense from cues in the face and the body language. A smile,  a frown, a sad look, each might be genuine or false, each might be perceived as genuine or false. The tilt of the head, the direction of gaze. Our mind processes all this material up. If the cues are consistent and strong, if they are not overwhelmed by a false "say cheese" smile or some other obvious artifice, if they are believable, we'll get that sense of personality. A false smile can be believable, if it appears to conceal something else, appears more than merely a response to a camera. Is the personality we sense genuine, an accident, or is the subject merely a good actor?

Who cares?

How can we convey a sense of narrative, of the subject's history, the life they have lived? Beyond the cues in the face and body: scars, wrinkles, any evidence of the passage of time writ on the subject's body. Also, clothing, glasses, jewelry, and other props all help support an idea of narrative. We'll fill in a boxer if we see broken, flattened nose. We'll fill in a widow if we see a ring on the old woman's finger. We'll fill in a hero's story if we see a uniform, we'll fill in scholar's life if we see tweed and a pipe.

This applies to portraits of people we do not recognize, especially, but also to well-known personalities with whom we have no personal contact. Karsh's famous portrait of Churchill without cigar, Churchill looking cranky, has shaped the way we perceive Churchill. In reality, it reveals nothing of the subject's personality, save that he gets cranky when someone snatches his cigar away from him, which is really nothing. In the viewer's mind, however, we form the impression of Churchill as stormy and implacable, supporting the historical view of him as a the master of the pithy bon mot and winner of WWII.

Symbols, Mandates and Cliches II

First, see definitions here.

A "Mandate" is just a visual idiom that a viewer is likely to expect you to use in some situation. Let's suppose it's attractive clouds over a landscape. If you haven't got any clouds over the landscape at the moment, but you really want to make a photograph, you've got a problem, right? This comes under the head of "breaking the rules" in pretty much the same way one might break the "rules" of formal composition. Let me note in passing that your best option may be to pack up for the day, and return when there are some clouds. However, let us move on assuming that's not an option.

Interestingly, music has more or less formalized the process of rule-breaking. I will attempt to translate my poor understanding of those formalisms to the land of photography.

Roughly, what you want to do is prepare the viewer for the broken rule, in music you sneak up on a dissonance by playing chords that are nearby, by almost playing the dissonant chord. When the dissonance arrives, it might be only a single note off of the previous and following chords. Visually, you haven't got time to work with, but you do have space.

The first thing you can do is follow other "rules" more scrupulously, to couch your cloudless sky in a comforting collection of familiar visual tropes: place your main point of visual interest on a "rule of thirds" line, say. The second thing you can do is make it obvious that the rule-breaking is deliberate: do not try to conceal or minimize the cloudless sky. The third thing you can do is wrap the broken rule itself in something familiar and rule-abiding: find a horizon line that's a strong diagonal, or make the sky be a powerful negative space echoing some other shape.

A broken "rule" is a powerful thing, an attention getter, a way to set the viewer ill-at ease and perhaps plant an idea or a feeling, but you mustn't lose the viewer. Give the viewer something comforting and easy to go with your bitter pill.

There is a school of thought which takes the rather silly remark "you have to know the rules in order to break them" and converts that in to "by breaking all the rules at once, I am awesome." A bunch of broken rules is just a mess.