Formal Composition, What's it For, Anyway?

Contemporary studies on how people look at Art have largely debunked theories of "eye leading", which were never that mainstream anyways. Leading lines are bunk, so are various "it leads the eye out of the frame" kinds of ideas. Bunk, nonsense, rubbish. Untrue and not useful.

Arnheim's book Art and Visual Perception makes these two things clear. That formal composition does have an effect on how we feel about, how we react to, a picture. Secondly, that any specific detail of line, form, placement, light, and so on, must be considered in relation to everything else in the picture. It is not the placement of the subject, considered alone, which matters. It is the placement of the subject relative to the other elements of the picture and the relations of those elements to one another which, considered as a whole, produces the effects. The Rule of Thirds, Golden Whatevers, indeed anything that prescribes or recommends ways to handle specific elements of composition in isolation, are all bunk.

And yet, the gestalt, the whole of the picture taken as formal arrangements of graphical elements, does something.

(the book makes many things clear, these two items are among them)

Molly Bang's book, How Pictures Work, may be viewed as a taut little manual based on Arnheim's survey of research, and illustrates many of the ideas quite neatly. One of the things that becomes exquisitely clear is that the line between formal composition and things like story, even trame, is completely blurred. She creates complete stories using only formal shapes and colors. The red triangle becomes the protagonist, the vertical bars are a dark forest, and so on.

So here's a theory for you, really just an expansion of these earlier remarks.

The formal elements of a picture are going to produce some sort of effect on you, insofar as they can be separated from the subject matter itself. Any arrangement of tone, of line, of form, is a composition. When we have a photograph, as a general rule, there will be some clear subject matter in the frame, some real objects, people, and so forth. This real scene will also produce some sort of effect as you read it and attempt to discern what was actually going on in front of the lens at that moment.

In a nutshell, we have the formal properties of the photograph, and the reality represented by the photograph. Each produces an effect.

These two effects can conflict, or align.

I think you can make an argument that, generally, it's a good idea to have them align.

Your picture of Little Red Riding Hood, worriedly walking through the dark forest should, when you squint at it to blur it into an abstraction of a red triangle for the girl and dark verticals for trees, still read as a worried red triangle walking through a dark forest per Molly Bang.

I don't really know why this alignment is a good idea, but here are some hypotheses:

• It makes the intent of the artist clear.
• It makes the picture look like it was made on purpose.
• Possibly there is something deeper going on in our visual cortex of whatever.

In any case this covers a lot of territory. It's why we isolate the subject, when there is one, with tone or color. It's why we manage white balance to create a cool mood, a warm mood, a sickly greenish mood -- whatever mood is in keeping with the idea of the picture. It's why we light the beautiful woman with soft beautiful light, why we light the chiseled athlete with hard, directional light. It's why we strive for visual balance, visual dynamism, visual imbalance, as needed to reflect the idea we're after.

Here too is a hint, perhaps, of how pure aesthetics might play in to the program. A beautiful subject, photographed with beautiful formal details, will generally produce a photograph which is itself a beautiful object. Similarly ugly, or horrific, but the market interest there is somewhat lower. I think there are many who would argue that it is enough to make a beautiful object, in which all the elements are pulling together toward beauty. Who am I, really, to disagree? The intent is clear. The picture looks like it was made on purpose. And perhaps there is some deeper cognitive satisfaction, or some deeper understanding of God, to be had from the picture alone if it be well enough made.

It all seems sort of obvious, stated this way, I think. But still, I feel good about being able to clear away a lot of clutter and underbrush, and to find that's what left is really what we knew all along, and that this seems to be on firm ground.

At any rate it is not clear to me how to knock the foundation out from under it.

Hasselblad/DJI/VMCap

Correction: an earlier version of this post cited Ventizz, the name of the firm is Vorndran Mannheims, or VMCap

Noodling on this over the last day one question keeps cropping up.

Why was VMCap (the private equity group that purchased Hasselblad) unwilling to infuse cash into the firm in order to ramp up manufacturing of an apparently successful camera? This is the nub of Kevin's article on LuLa, that VMCap was not and that therefore the outside investors (DJI) had to be asked for more money.

Infusing capital in order to build out successful business lines is literally VMCap's business. This is what they exist to do.

Apparently the X1D manufacturing buildout was not what they had in mind. Are they getting cold feet on the whole deal, or were the expecting Oosting to do something else, which they would have funded?

Back to posting about Art and Process shortly, I swear it. I'm working on a piece.

Hasselblad on LuLa

I want to take a moment to tip my hat to LuLa. I've had my differences with them in the past and no doubt will again, I find much of the content to be a bit fluffy and a sometimes a bit sycophantic, but this piece on Hasselblad is a good, solid, piece of industry reporting. It's legitimately news, in the sense of New Information, it's interesting to, well, to the people it interests, and it's thorough.

Has Perry Oosting become an M&A guy, or is he still a luxury guy at heart?

It would make sense to divide the Hasselblad brand at this point, into a premium drone-camera thing, and a luxury/pro camera thing. But splitting a company that small up is challenging. Still, the question remains, what on earth is DJI planning for what we perceive as the core products of the company? The products DJI's investments seem to have actually funded?

It's possible that the game was, all along, sure, we'll fund your stupid pet projects until we acquire control, and then we're going to shoot them all, fire you all, and stick your logo on our drones. It's possible nobody really has a long term plan, and everyone's just standing around waiting for someone else to discover some mysterious synergy, which may or may not materialize. I've seen both.

I expect DJI to drop in an executive or two to, as I like to put it, "see if there's a pony in here somewhere."

The Diamond Ratio

Victory. Ai-ap.com seems to have linked to here in all seriousness. Which shows you just how shoddy a publication they are.

Disabling comments. This is a heavily linked-to post, so it attracts a lot of spam.

You have no doubt heard of the Golden Ratio, which is somehow or other connected to the Golden Mean and the Fibonacci Spiral, which is oft-touted as the basis of all great compositions. It is less likely that you have heard of the Diamond Ratio. This predates the Golden Ratio by 1000 years or more, having been first described by the Greek Philosopher Diogenes in his Disquisitiones Ultimatum dos Artes.

Socrates calls is the "Lord of Ratios", Archilochos called it the "Hero's Rectangle", and Plato refers to it constantly as the most pleasing of proportions.

Begin with a square. Inscribe within it a smaller square, rotated 45 degrees as shown. This is the Diamond.

Bisect the Diamond. This line is the Diagonal of Diogenes, who we denote with the letter R for Kalamari R. Diogenes (his full name):

Rotate the Diagonal of Diogenes around its endpoint until it is vertical. This gives the length of the long side of the Diamond Rectangle.

And finally complete the rectangle.

A little calculation gives us an approximation to the Diamond Ratio, the ratio of the sides of the Diamond Rectangle, as 1 to 1.4571. This is quite similar to our modern 3:2 ratio, the standard from 35mm film, which has been inherited by most DSLRs. Note, however, that the result is a more solid, pleasing ratio than the slightly-too-long full frame standard. Who has not looked at the standard 3:2 frame and thought to himself "nice, but I'd trim it down just a little on the long side." And so, apparently, knew the ancients just as well.

The Diamond Ratio appears throughout Art from antiquity to the modern era, of course. The pyramids. The Sphinx. The Egyptians naturally knew it. It appears in several of the important architectural features of the Parthenon, the Pantheon, and the Pantherone of ancient Greece, Rome, and Gaul.

The uses of The Eye versus The Foot in arranging things within the frame of the Diamond Rectangle is subtle, powerful, but a little too complex for the present introductory essay. Suffice it to say that The Eye shows the way toward placing the most important lightnesses and the heavier structural elements, when possible, lend themselves to The Foot of the Diamond Rectangle.

Sticking to the well known visual arts, though, here are some examples to illustrate the point. The most famous painting in the world is built on Diamond Rectangles, obviously:

And another well known painting:

It's perhaps even more blindingly clear on Botticelli's Venus:

And perhaps the clearest example of all, Leonardo's Last Supper is a textbook example of how to use it. Those skilled in the art will see near perfect utilization of the properties of The Eye and The Foot throughout.

No philosophers were harmed in the production of this helpful essay.

Rachmael Pendragon/On Compositon

As noted earlier, I found myself interested in why I so disliked this guy's photos. After a lot of noodling, I am prepared to offer an explanation and maybe a little insight into composition's role in photography.

First, let's throw one of the photos up for another look:

There's a standard trick one can do with a picture, which is to squint at it until the whole thing is blurry in your vision. Then look for the most visually dominant part, the brightest patch or the point of highest contrast. This probably simulates the first few milliseconds of looking at a picture, before your visual system resolves any details.

Conventional wisdom says to place that point of most arresting visual business on the subject. See pretty much any Rembrandt painting for a blunt-force example.

Pendragon's pictures almost without exception have that point of visual interest somewhere in the out-of-focus background.

Is Rembrandt's trick just a trope we expect, or something basic to the operation of the visual cortext? Don't know, don't care. The point is that, used in the traditional way, it telegraphs the artist's intention. Pendragon is defying that, and telegraphing conflicting information. The subject(s), in focus, front and center are the obvious point of interest, but the most visually arresting point is not there, it's somewhere behind them.

Further, as previously noted, Pendragon resolutely insists on tonally blending his subjects into the background, while simultaneously separating them from the background with his focus/depth-of-field. Another conflict in his telegraphed intentions. Returning again to Rembrandt we can see that the dutchman often failed to separate his subjects from the backgrounds -- it's not a requirement that one do so. What Rembrandt did do, though, was make clear that he did not give one single shit about that separation. He telegraphed his intentions with crystal clarity.

In short, Pendragon's visual intentions are conflicting, confusing. We are justified in assuming that a photographer is making these choices deliberately, I think. While a photographer may not control all the details of the frame, she certainly can control what pictures we see. So, let us assume that Pendragon is making these choices on purpose and proceed.

What we have is ambiguous, chaotic, visual intention. How, then, shall we move up the ladder to the artistic intent? Is Pendragon making a statement about something chaotic, or ambiguous, or conflicting? Is there something about the wild visual panoply that is New York City in here? This might be a great way to start. Unfortunately, I'm not seeing it. There's nothing in the subject matter to support that idea. The subject matter appears to be very ordinary "street portraits" of the interesting characters you'll find a-plenty in any moderately sized urban environment.

I am forced to conclude that either Pendragon is almost certainly just incompetent. Perhaps he's adopted this weird mess of conflicting visuals in a vague attempt at a "signature style" but it's just a mess. I suspect that he has no artistic intent at all, beyond "film is cool".

Either way, I don't this his pictures work very well.

So what does all this say about composition as an activity, as something one ought to do in a picture?

Well, let us once again dismiss all that "eye leading" crap. Composition is not for helping the viewer figure out what's in the picture.

What it does do is telegraph the artist's intentions. The visual ideas, ideally, pull together to let us know what the artist thought was important and what was not, what the artist saw. The visual ideas support the artist's intentions. If the picture is about conflict, the visual ideas should emphasize the conflict. If the picture is about peace, the visual ideas might be peaceful, balanced. And so on.

The purpose of composition is, perhaps, not to help us to read the picture but the artist.

Criticism: Elizabeth Hosking

As if to prove me wrong, Chris Gampat and his ever-changing cast of helpers have dug up someone I actually like. Elizabeth Hosking, web site here. Looking through her online portfolio will only take a few minutes.

The first thing that struck me about this body of work is the coherent visual aesthetic applied across a wide variety of subjects. She loves the high contrast, and many pictures are a wash of black, or a wash of white, usually with "the important bit" in a relatively small region of the opposing tone. I admire the ability to successfully deploy the same set of visual ideas in many ways, and she manages it. I think.

It's possible I like her work largely because she buries masses of the frame in black or in white, leaving only small areas with much actual content. My own visual aesthetic, to the trivial extent that I possess one, is to bury as much as possible in a sort of gruesome mud. So, prejudices no doubt apply.

In general, her work seems to strive for, and produce, a sensation of what it is like to be there. I don't feel any deep philosophical message, or any particular narrative. She seems to me to be purely interested in helping us to feel as if we are there. This aligns with her self-description as "documentary" but I appreciate that she takes an allegorical approach rather than a literal one. She shows us slices, bits and pieces, that stand in for the larger thing rather than shooting a naive head-on document.

I find her projects and collections slightly repetitious, a little too long.

"The Actor's Center" uses perhaps too many frames of people rehearsing than is necessary, but the marked up scholarly script she includes is wonderful. This theme of the "odd man out" frame appears in a couple of other places. "These Hands of Mine" includes what I think is a photograph in a little folio, re-photographed by Hosking. Then, in a minor stroke of genius, another little photograph re-photographed on one of the subject's hands. Well done to connect the object to the theme and to the subjects.

In "The Actor's Center", in contrast to her street photographs, Hosking focuses often on the faces of the subjects, showing us the intensity of what's going on. The marked script strikes me really as the foundation of the work, though. It's scholarly, with a ton of footnotes and some serious notes hand-written, suggesting a degree of seriousness and intensity which is well-supported by the pictures of the people. There are also doodles, speaking to a certain whimsy and sense of fun, which also reads in the other pictures.

If it were my work, I'd have tried to get a little more visual variety in the series, possibly photographing the empty space, props, that sort of thing. It's not my work, though. It is, I think, successful as is.

"These Hands of Mine" seems to me to be well balanced and satisfying, as well as containing the aforementioned bit of genius. It might be the strongest work here. Still, it's hard to judge, since it's also got the most emotionally intense subject matter.

"Daily Rider" also includes an odd-man-out picture, an empty train seat. Traces of a person, without the actual person, just their marks. This series also stands out as a good use of the trope of shooting people from behind. While Hosking may be, like so many "street photographers" too shy to photograph strangers from the front, she does it better than most here. She embraces the anonymization her angle of view creates, and gives us fragments of people. Whatever her motivation for shooting from behind, she uses other visual ideas to support the idea of making the subjects anonymous, generic, everyman figures, and so is able to sell the idea better. I'm still not 100% comfortable with it, but it's well done.

The empty train seat functions in much the same was as the marked up script. It's a little slice, an allegorical bit standing in for a larger thing. I read this as the anonymity of the commute, the human mass and the trains that move it, all like a colony of ants in motion. Again, I think this is quite successful.

"Street Singles" is maybe the weakest of the lot, it reads like spot news photography done by someone without the courage to shoot people except from behind. It's workmanlike, but not terrific. I like the pictures, but mainly because I love photos of LGBT folks flying their flags, being happy, and getting their voices heard.

Finally, her "Land" series. These resemble in many ways a series of photographs my father shot and printed and gave me a framed set of, many years ago. So, again, prejudices surely apply. I find them quite lovely and arresting. This is where we see the artist applying her visual aesthetic to radically different subject matter, and where she inverts the dark-with-spots-of-light to give us white-with-spots-of-dark, which is a strong move on her part. Still distinctly Hosking, but definitely a different thing.

This series lacks an "odd man out" frame, but still has that allegorical feel. That flavor of what it is like to be standing here on this land, cold, austere, remote, but revealed in a handful of nearly abstract frames which surely look, literally, almost nothing like what they are pictures of. This feels like a work in progress to me, rather than a completed thing.

I like this photographer. She's not my favorite, but I think she does solid work.

Waffling

As always, here I am waffling. Just when I decide that composition simply doesn't matter a whit, content is the only thing that does, Chris Gampat and his crew of merry incompetents digs up Rachmael Pendragon, a NYC photographer who runs around with a large format camera taking pictures of attention seekers. Here are a couple of samples, notable for reasons I will get into in a moment:

There's more. Punk rockers and the like. Rachmael seems to want to be a sort of low-rent Arbus. More work here: Rachmael Pendragon.

Here's the thing that really bugs me about Rachmael's pictures: He has no concept of tonally separating his subjects from the backgrounds. In one of the pictures above he even places the black guy against a black background and simultaneously finds a light background for the white guy and, incredibly, a dark background for the white guy's dark hat. The only "proper" tonal separation here is the black guy's hair against a light background. This failure to separate is so frequent that he might be doing it on purpose. It's haphazard enough to make me wonder, though.

I used to say things that "composition helps to clarify the picture for the viewer" without explaining why or how, because that's what everyone does. There's some sort of vague BS about leading the eye around the frame and whatnot. That's rubbish. In Rachmael's pictures, in particular, we find the human faces instantly (duh) and look at them. Not only are the faces, the people, front and center, but our optical system is literally a face-finding machine. We don't actually need the tonal separation to know what's important. Rachmael's mis-composition is not leaving us unable to figure out his pictures. I don't even think it's making it more difficult.

And yet, and yet.

Obviously I have prejudices. If Chris Gampat's crew have picked out someone for mention, my assumption is that they're pretty bad. Anyone who affects a large format camera and a made-up-name (actually several made-up-names, "Sironar de Bergerac" haw haw haw among them) and takes pictures of attention whores can't be any good, right?

I am trying to dig through these prejudices and see if the pictures still bug me. If they do, I would very much like to know why they bug me.