Aesthetics: Framing vs. Pointing

[Jim Rhoades]

What a wonderful thread. Eugene, Thanks for reminding me about Doctor Zhivago, you are of course right. Out of Africa struck me more as a magazine article on how to take sunrise & sunset photos. That is of course my bias showing. Paulr, about dodging bullets. W. Eugene Smith dodged alot of bullets in WWII before being blown up on Okinawa . Every scene in Zorba looks like a Smith photo essay from the Spanish Village.

[Andrew O'Neill]

Another master at composition and framing in the cinema was Kurosawa. Especially his "Seventh Samarai". I really like some of his interior scenes of the locals. He would start with an unbalanced composition and then someone would plunk down in front of the camera completing a perfect composition. It's also interesting to watch Kubrick's films too. He started off as a still photographer which helps explain his strong compositional eye. By the way, I love Citizen Kane. I use bits and pieces of this film as a basis to filmmaking for my students (I teach high school).
Teaching about composition to teenagers is a real challenge. But once I show them good composition vs. bad composition, they quickly see the power!

[Benno Jones]

BTW - "The Third Man", one of my favorite movies of all time, was directed by Carol Reed. Wells co-starred and is responsible for the famous 'Cukoo Clock' speech, but had nothing at all to do with the direction, cinematography and the rest of the script. By all accounts he was a pain in the neck to work with on the movie and refused to shoot in the Vienna sewers - they had to go back to England and build sewer sets for the final scenes. See the very good Criterion DVD release and the bonus documentaries.

The final shot of Joseph Cotton waiting as Valli walks towards and past him is my favorite shot of all time. I would love to shoot a photograph that echoed that shot.

Benno Jones
Seattle, WA

[fred arnold]

An example of a framed movie I like is, "Dr. Strangelove". There are some static shots, especially during the speech by Gen. Ripper on communists, where you can see how Kubrik's time as a still photographer influenced his filmmaking. The scene in "Spartacus", where the discussion of matters of taste between Crassus and Antoninus, is a wonderful use of color to accentuate the light and shadow, which enhances the uncomfortable discussion.

[Ken Lee]

It's best not to limit ourselves with theories.



Each subject deserves its own framing - or lack thereof. Some subjects demand sparse framing, while others demand a lot.

[Paddy Quinn]

Szarkowski says some interesting and pertinent things about pointing, gesture and framing in part of his introduction to the four volume series on Atget:

"Atget, Pointing"

"As a way of beginning, one might compare the art of photography to the act of pointing. All of us, even the best-mannered of us, occasionally point, and it must be true that some of us point to more interesting facts, events, circumstances, and configurations than others. It is not difficult to imagine a person-a mute Virgil of the corporeal world-who might elevate the act of pointing to a creative plane, a person who would lead us through the fields and streets and indicate a sequence of phenomena and aspects that would be beautiful, humorous, morally instructive, cleverly ordered, mysterious, or stonishing, once brought to our attention, but that had been unseen before, or seen dumbly, without comprehension. This talented practitioner of the new discipline (the discipline a cross, perhaps, between theater and criticism) would perform with a special grace, sense of timing, narrative sweep, and wit, thus endowing the act not merely with intelligence, but with that quality of formal rigor that identifies a work of art, so that we woud be uncertain, when remembering the adventure of the tour, how much of our pleasure and sense of enlargement had come from the things pointed to and how much from the pattern created by the pointer.

To note the similarity between photography and pointing seems to me useful. Surely the best of photographers have been first of all pointers-men and women whose work says: I call your attention to this pyramid, face, battlefield, pattern of nature, ephemeral juxtaposition.

But it is also clear that the simile has flaws, which become obvious if we consider the different ways in which the photographer and the hypothetical pointer work. The formal nature of pointing (if the notion is admissible) deals with the center of an undefined field. The finger points to (of course) a point, or to a spot not much larger: to the eyes of the accused, or a cloud in the sky, or a finial or cartouche on a curious building, or to the running pickpocket-without describing the context in which the spot should be considered. An art of pointing would be a conceptual art, for the subject of the work would be defined in intellectual or psychic terms, not by an objective physical record. The pointing finger identifies that conceptual center on which the mind's eye focuses-a clear patch of the visual field that one might cover with a silver dollar held at arm's length-outside of which a progressive vagueness extends to the periphery of our vision.

The photographer's procedure (and problem) is different, for whether he means to or not he will make a picture of sorts: a discrete object with categorical edges.

Eugene Atget was a commercial photographer who worked in and aroud Paris for more than thirty years. When he died in 1927, his work was known in part to a few archivists and artists who shared his interest in the visible record of French culture. Little is known about is life, and less about his intentions, except as they can be inferred from his work. In his lifetime Atget made perhaps ten thousand photographs; almost all of these describe the historic character of French life, as indicated by its architecture, its landscape, its work, and its unconsidered, vernacular gestures...."

[Benoit Vollmer]

Hello,



Reading your intervention, I thought about a third possibility. One can off course choose to point or frame his picture, and you explain this very well.

But I see something else possible. We can also try to compose our picture, which means a really different approach to me. I believe that there is a very strong notion of exclusion in framing a picture. You intentionnaly limit the field, take a small part of the world and shoot. While composing, the approach is much more to include things in the image. Maybe closing a bit more the image, so that it is something more complete, sufficient to itself.

In my mind, framing refers more to an instinctive, fast shoot. A crop of reality. I think about reportage and war photographers, James Nachtwey is a perfect exemple to me. And composing should be more like, er... So much photographers I like: Weston, Adams...

Don't know if you understand what I mean, as you've probably guessed i'm not American or English, just a frenchie, and this is my first post on this forum. Seems I didn't take the easiewt, huh?

And also, about a very "photographic-sight" movie, in color and more recently, what do you think of The Straight Story, by D. Lynch. Or maybe, in black and white, Dead Man, from Jim Jarmusch. Those two are my favourite, definitely.



Benoît

[paulr]

"My argument contends that "pointing" is a largely an aesthetic frame. It's a style we often see in newspapers and TV news. However, it is no less "documentary" than other means, and more often than not it is being used to further an agenda, or at least has been coloured by the person(s) creating the images."

Sure ... this idea of pointing does not mean that you are seeing reality untouched. it means you are seeing some kind of illusion of reality being untouched. or at least that the artist is expressing the IDEAL of presenting reality untouched. In fact, the artist (and the medium, and the ideas brought to the picture by the viewer) have touched reality in a million different ways, just like with any other image-making medium or style. And yes, there's usually an agenda implied--in this case the agenda is typically something like "i want you to see and to think about what i saw, not to see or think about me."

On Atget:
I strongly suspect Szarkowski is using the term pointing in a different sense in this passage. He refers to pointing in the conceptual sense of drawing our attention to something worthwhile, but I don't think he's suggesting atget used pointing as an esthetic means (in the same way that his other pet photographer, Dianne Arbus did).

And on the thought that "It's best not to limit ourselves with theories."
Who would argue? I like discussions like this because they can open up new possibilities for understanding work. These ideas (like any critical idea or theory) are dead weight unless we use them for the purposes of illumination. I wouldn't want anyone to walk away from this thinking "ok, I'm a pointer." or "ok, I'm a framer." This kind of thought is limiting. The goal is to have more tools at your disposal for understanding your work or other peoples'.

[CXC]

Thinking constructively, about how these ideas can help one with one's own photography, maybe it boils down to "the right tool for the right job".

I see in my own stuff two major trends, one towards "abstraction", and one towards "portraiture", with a fair amount of overlap. I'm comfortable with my methods for obtaining an abstract shot, that is, a pretty arrangement of darks and lights over the entire surface of the print.

My portraiture is less sure (perhaps it would be better called "pointrature", since subjects are buildings or trees, not poeple, with arrangement and lighting out of my control).

Let's take a concrete example. I am looking right now at my photo of the Chrysler building. This is clearly a portrait, with the building centered and dominating the image. But after the shooting and printing, with the matte knife, I fussed tremendously about the exact framing, about how much of each of the surrounding buildings to include, what angle to cut them off, how much sky, etc., to the point that the final image isn't a true rectangle, tapering towards the top.

It's a nice enough photo, but I'm not convinced those post-process framing efforts were what it took for it to be the best it could be. In theory, I believe that post-camera cropping of a portrait shouldn't "change" the image in any way. The gesture has been made, it is complete. Maybe chop off the useless parking lot in the forground, or some of the blank sky on top, but maintain an arbitrariness, or at least a sense of arbitrariness, completely.

It's probably impossible for me to ignore the background, given the stately pace of large format photography. This means I need to develop a separate approach for portrait framing, basically to keep the background in the back, as it were.

Yes, this all sounds very artificial. As I mentioned before, issues of truth vs. artificiality, and (accurate) story telling, do not interest me; my only goal is to put someting up on the wall that is worth looking at.

[paulr]

Another way ideas like this can help you is by giving some clarity to your work when you try to understand it.
I'm never thinking analytically while i photograph ... to such a degree that when I'm looking at my work, it's often a wide open question as to what it is I'm up to. My work is exploratory in nature, and a lot of the understanding of what was explored, and why, comes after the fact. Often it's been observations from people on the outside (similar to this pointing vs. framing one) that have helped me see more deeply into my own process.