still life # 14 ~ /on seeing

Still Life ~ Duquesne Light (Pittsburgh, PA) Ad • click to embiggenThis might be rather shocking to some, but, over the course of my 30 year commercial picture making, virtually all of my pictures were vertical rectangles - very few square pictures amongst them. Obviously, that's because every picture was for publication on pages that were vertical rectangles - magazine ads, annual reports, marketing brochures / catalogues, books, and the like. Other than some pictures made in the panoramic format (mainly for editorial and annual report work) and some square polaroid pictures (editorial work), the only exception to the vertical rectangle format was pictures made for use across a double-page spread which were made in the horizontal format.

That said, the reason for today's vertical rectangular picture is for the purpose of, once again, grappling with the notion of composition*.

Vertical rectangular format aside, the salient point about the picture, composition wise, is that it is a still life picture. A picture in which the composition is entirely manufactured. The act of combining parts or elements to form a whole (read * at the bottom of this entry) was entirely arbitrary inasmuch as there was no "map" or directive given by the client (Duquense Light - a transmission and distribution of electric energy company). The only requirement for the picture was "to make a picture that represents our company's services in support of contractors and architects".

So, after rounding up a bunch of appropriate props - many more than pictured here, I set about playing around with them in order to arrive at a visually pleasing arrangement. In doing so, I was assisted in no small part by my "sense of harmonic proportions" (see civilized ku # 773), not to mention about 20 sheets of 4×5 Polaroid film. Never once did I consider / consult "the rules of composition".

Now, lest anyone think this recounting is an exercise in self aggrandizement / promotion, here's the point ....

It has been noted that some of the picture-making instructional books have examples of various compositional rules / styles and that some of them also have suggested "exercises" that are supposed to help one improve / one their picture making skills.

Well, after posting the gourd & dry flowers picture in civilized ku # 776, I got to thinking about the thousands of still life pictures that I made in my commercial picture making days. Even though I used my seemingly preternatural sense of harmonic proportions to make those pictures - pictures that made my clients very happy, what occurred to me was to wonder whether the process of making a still life picture, composition wise, could be "reverse engineered" in order to help someone without a preternatural sense of harmonic proportions develop such as sense.

After contemplating that possibility, I am convinced that such an "exercise" - making a still life picture - could be a tremendous aid in developing a sense of harmonic proportions.

Think about it. You start from nothing, gather a few items, and arrange them - from a fixed camera POV, not from your eye's POV - in an aesthetically pleasing arrangement. In the digital world, you can picture each and every arrangement variation (instead of using a lot of polaroid) for "analysis" on the camera's LCD (chimping) and on the computer screen, or, eventually, in print.

Think about it. In the absence of any guide / map, AKA - "rules", you have to depend upon the "feel" of how the things look / work together to form the whole. Some arrangements will look and feel disjointed, awkward or "wrong". Others will look and feel synergetic, harmonious, or "right".

Think about it. There is no hard-and-fast "right" or "wrong" in this exercise. Much depends upon your own innate / native sense of right" and "wrong" but that, in fact, is precisely the point - you will begin to identify your personal sense of "right" and "wrong". You will begin to sense / understand what works for you which should be the basis for developing your own personal way of making pictures of what you see.

Think about it. Developing the ability to make a successful still life "composition" and recognizing it as such, will eventually help you - out in the "found" picture making world - recognize / see, relative to your referent and your intent, a combination of parts or elements that form a visually pleasing whole.

Think about it, and, please let me know what you think about it.

*as stated previously, I don't believe that there is such a thing as "the rules of composition" but I don't know what word to use, other than "composition", when discussing the structure of a picture. So, when I use that word, it should be understood in the simplest manner - the act of combining parts or elements to form a whole. And, IMO, there are about a zillion-and-a-half ways of combining parts or elements to form a whole, picture making wise. In fact, when it comes to great / good / interesting pictures, I would venture that there are as many ways of combining parts or elements to form a whole as there are pictures.

Comments

[Sven W]

Yep, I can understand the logic behind this idea. It's one thing to recognise a scene that is ready-made and in balance and quite another to adjust your viewpoint of the same scene (or tweak the scene itself) to improve it's balance. The latter requires much more creativity (perhaps the former does not require any creativitiy, just good taste).

I'm still thinking about your notion (or should I say perception) that there are no rules of composition. A possible analogy is how we generally learn to write. My schooling (many years ago) involved little to no lessons on grammar, but by reading [well-written] texts I learnt grammar through osmosis. I've since taken a course in [English] grammar and let me tell you there are hundreds of grammatical rules! Fortunately our brains can learn grammar by example ... I'd be a hopeless writer if I had to "consult" the rules of grammar before writing something.

[Mark M]

Reading this post, a person can begin to understand why we try to invent rules or at least begin to formalize and understand our intuitions in more concrete terms. For instance, when shooting a commercial assignment it isn't enough to know what feels right to you. On some level it also has to feel and look right to your client, which means you need to understand the work from more than one vantage point. One thing that I think is so interesting about commercial work despite the poor opinion the art world has of it, is that it gets you out of your own head for a while and encourages you to think on a more practical plane from the point of view of someone who has a very concrete idea they want to communicate.

Also, I generally agree with you about the 'rules' but I understand their appeal. I've been writing a lot of publisher reviews for book proposals lately and the dependence on rules is so disappointing and boring in these books. But I understand the temptation to try to formulate rules. After all, you realize one setup looks right and one looks wrong—it's natural to ask why. Once you start answering the question of why something looks right or wrong, it is hard not to put the answer in the form of a general principle, to try to find some underlying concept at work to explain the rightness or wrongness. This quickly starts to sound like a rule. While it's almost impossible to explain an intuition to a student, a rule or general principle is easy to explain.

[Mark M]

PS. Really cool photo.