Take a number of shots using lines to create a sense of depth. Shooting with a wide- angle lens (zooming out) strengthens a diagonal line by giving it more length within the frame. The effect is dramatically accentuated if you choose a viewpoint close to the line.
Around the time Atget took the photograph above, two developments coincided to challenge illusionism in photography. Although simple hand-held Kodak cameras had been readily available since the late 1880s, it was the introduction of the 35mm Leica in 1924 that finally freed photographers from the restrictions of a large and cumbersome plate camera mounted on a tripod. And from recent developments in painting there came the sudden recognition of the photograph as a flat surface.
László Moholy-Nagy was a crucial figure for photography in the Bauhaus, the radical German school of art and design. By the time it closed in 1933, having been successively expelled from the cities of Weimar, Dessau and Berlin, the Bauhaus had made an indelible stamp upon the future development of art, design and photography. It also became a ‘point of origin’ for art schools, including the OCA. László Moholy-Nagy encouraged his students to use the new 35mm camera technology together with a high viewpoint perpendicular to the subject to create pictures with a flat, abstract quality.
Now take a number of shots using lines to flatten the pictorial space. To avoid the effects of perspective, the sensor/film plane should be parallel to the subject and you may like to try a high viewpoint (i.e. looking down). Modern architecture offers strong lines and dynamic diagonals, and zooming in can help to create simpler, more abstract compositions.
Review your shots from both parts of Exercise 1.3. How do the different lines relate to the frame? There’s an important difference from the point exercises: a line can leave the frame. For perpendicular lines this doesn’t seem to disrupt the composition too much, but for perspective lines the eye travels quickly along the diagonal and straight out of the picture. It feels uncomfortable because the eye seems to have no way back into the picture except the point that it started from. So another ‘rule’ of photography is that ‘leading lines’ should lead somewhere within the frame.
In The Photographer’s Eye, the influential American curator John Szarkowski (1925–2007) identified’ the central act of photography’ as a decision about what to include and what to reject, which, ‘forces a concentration on the picture edge…and on the shapes that are created by it’
(Szarkowski, 2007, p.4).
In his essay ‘Photographs of America: Walker Evans’ in ‘Walker Evans American Photographs’ (2012) Lincoln Kirstein writes, ‘The most characteristic single feature of Evans’ work is its purity, or even its puritanism. It is “straight” photography not only in technique but in the rigorous directness of its way of looking. All through the pictures in this book you will search in vain for an angle-shot. Every object is regarded head-on with the unsparing frankness of a Russian ikon or a Flemish portrait.
(2012, p198)
The original 1938 edition of American Photographs contained the following statement: THE REPRODUCTIONS PRESENTED IN THIS BOOK ARE INTENDED TO BE LOOKED AT IN THEIR GIVEN SEQUENCE. While there are plenty of images from ‘American Photographs’ available on the web, to view the sequence and truly appreciate the transcendental quality of Evans’ framing you probably need to find a copy of the book, which has recently been reprinted in a relatively affordable edition by Tate Publishing.
For Victor Burgin (b. 1941), composition is ‘a device for retarding…recognition of the frame’ (Burgin, 1980, p.56). Looking back at some of your compositional exercises from earlier in Part One, would you agree that in the less conventionally successful shots, there is the feeling of a ‘cropped view’ rather than a ‘transparent window to the world’? Alfred Stieglitz’s (1864–1946) cloudscapes, the Equivalents, illustrate Burgin’s point. They don’t appear to be composed at all; instead they’re ‘equivalent’ in that any section of the sky would seem to do as well as any other. Because there’s no sense of composition our eye is drawn to the edges, to the frame. For its time, this sense of a cropped rather than a composed view made the Equivalents feel uniquely photographic.
Lines
Contrast plays a big part when defining lines, whether that be light and shade; hues and colour; textures and shapes. Lines are stronger elements than ‘points’ in the previous exercise. They give context, structure, position in static images, but they can also depict movement along their length.
Horizontal lines are the most pleasing to the eye as they give images a grounding. They draw the eye from left to right and back again. They can also give the impression of breadth and distance with the horizon as an example.
Vertical lines can prove more uncomfortable to the eye than horizontal ones. They tend to work better in multiples as opposed to a single vertical element. The vertical line is however, the main axis when photographing people and give more of a sense of movement better than horizontals.
Together, horizontal and vertical lines compliment each other bringing balance to an image.
Diagonal lines are less set in stone as the previous two. They don’t have to conform to to the fixed axis of the horizontal and vertical. Diagonal lines give images a more dynamic look and give a more exaggerated sense of direction and speed. Diagonals can be given more visual effect by changing the viewpoint which can exaggerate perspective by the lines converging at a steeper angle.
Lines used to start a movement
With the emergence of the Modernist movement in the late 19th/early 20th centuries, it was the turning point of photography and made it an art form in its own right. Prior to this, photgraphy was being used to place beauty, tonality, and composition above creating an accurate visual record known as Pictorialism.
Modernist Photography (1910-1950) moved away from the Pictorialist mode that had dominated the medium for 50 years, in the United States, Latin America, Africa and Europe. Influenced by Modernism or to make something “new”, photographers created sharply focused images, with emphasis on formal qualities, exploiting, rather than obscuring the camera as an essentially mechanical and technological tool. Instrumental for this trend was critic Sadakichi Hartmann’s 1904 “Plea for a Straight Photography” rejecting the artistic manipulations, soft focus and painterly characteristic of Pictorialism and promoting the straightforward, unadulterated images of modern life in the work of artists such as Alfred Stieglitz. Innovators like Paul Strand and Edward Weston, through their work techniques, would further expand the artistic capabilities of photography helping to establish it as an independent art form.
In 1932, Edward Weston along with 10 younger photographers like Ansel Adams, founded the Group f/64 based on the ideals of straight photography and became the most progressive association of its time.
My shots
I started to wonder where I could find strong enough lines in my local area. I settled on the village of Staverton which has its own steam railway. The railway lines were the perfect, if not a little obvious, use of lines.
These shots all give a sense of depth and distance. They lead the eye, which allows the photographer to direct the viewer’s eye to where they want it to go.
Using a flat plain lines can still be effective in showing depth. Whether that be modernist/brutalist architecture (there isn’t much in the local area) or more agricultural forms or using shadows to create interest.
Reflection
The different shots in this exercise all use lines. The first set of images use lines to draw the eye of the viewer to a certain point. They give depth and a feeling of movement towards the destination. The second set use lines in a more structural way, but the detail of the subject offers the interest and the linear elements give it form with the repetition of the lines are a strong graphical element which makes the image appealing to the eye.
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