ku 579 ~ Spring has sprung # 7
Wednesday, April 15, 2009 at 10:13AM 
A Spring thicket • click to embiggenThe Frame - one of the characteristics and problems inherent in the medium of photography.
The photographer's picture was not conceived but selected, his subjects were never truly discrete, never wholly self-contained. The edges of his film demarcated what he thought most important, but the subject he had shot was something else; it extended in four directions ... The central act of photography, the act of choosing and eliminating, forces a concentration on the picture edge - the line that separates in from out - and on the shapes that are created by it. ~ John Szarkowski - from The Photographer's Eye
In case anyone was wondering, the black frame common to all of my pictures - a nod to the wet-darkroom tradition of printing the film's clear borders - is the most obvious of my techniques that "forces a concentration on the picture edge - the line that separates in from out - and on the shapes that are created by it".
gravitas et nugalis
Featured Comment: Bill Gotz asked a very good question: "Do you find any irony in the fact that the black edge was usually included to prove that the picture was reproduced full frame, as the photographer originally took it, but that your photographs are created by cropping?"
my response: While I might vigorously protest that my pictures are NOT cropped - I see square, even if my sensor does not - the fact is that my square pictures are cropped from a rectangular image file. Since, up 'til now there were no dslrs that offered native in-camera square image files, I have been forced into using what the US military calls a field-expediency methodology to get squared away.
But, to answer your question - "Yes. Absolutely." My entire visual presentation is intended to be somewhat ironic or, at the very least, a bit of trompe l'oeil - very much intended to be a sort of backhanded slap across the face of the digital perfectionists in the photography crowd who are in hot pursuit of technically perfect but insipidly dull (content-wise) pictures.
Reader Comments (3)
Do you find any irony in the fact that the black edge was usually included to prove that the picture was reproduced full frame, as the photographer originally took it, but that your photographs are created by cropping?
Isn't this the week you are supposed to be mostly pictures, little commnentary?
Or is that what you are doing?
Right now I'm more interested in expanding past the frame (through multiple frames), but I have thought of scratching marks for a square on one of my focusing screens.