Or minimalism by another name, a name that for me better captures the value of an uncluttered photograph. Minimalist is descriptive and too often a goal in itself. But what if we try to describe the effects of such photographs, thinking more about the viewing experience and less about the composition? What is it about such photographs that I find appealing? The reduced color palette, the sparse visual field, the soothing nature of the scene. I took this photograph, so I can’t help but recall the day I wandered through the dunes, alone. No wind disturbed the silence. I recall all this when I see this photo.
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But even if I hadn’t been there to experience the scene, when I look at this photograph I feel a sense of calm. I assume it is quiet and peaceful, and I don’t want to disturb that quiet. Rather than describe this photo as minimalist, I prefer quiet because that’s what the photograph encourages in me.
I know I am supposed to like and to produce minimalist photographs. Dominant, singular subjects against a diffuse and often homogenous background are striking. Particularly if black and white. There is no denying that the photographs of Michael Kenna, e.g., or Hiroshi Sugimoto’s still life and abstract work, some of Fan Ho’s street photography, again e.g., are striking. As are some of the portraits of Arnold Newman. Color photography too offers lovely examples, not infrequently the iconic lone tree on a hill (or versions of the radically expensive Rhein II). Long exposures of piers extending out into water, or the pylons that used to support some pier or other structure jutting out from the water in both black and white, and in color, make compelling and convenient subjects for minimalist photographs.
The lure of minimalist photographs is real. They offer a chance to pause and to think. There’s a type of quiet calmness to them. They encourage a sort of meditative reflection. The simplicity (minimalism) is a nice alternative to the frenetic and noisy world. But they risk being mechanical. They rely not on the interplay of different visual elements so much as the prominence of a single visual feature. The key is finding a way to isolate a subject. Sometimes this is easy; sometimes difficult.
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Photographs with more in them, more visual elements encourage a different way of composing and of viewing. Even when there’s a dominate subject, the busyness around that subject, thinking about what portions of the foreground to include, what part of the background to obscure with the main subject, ask me to think differently about composition. And the resulting photograph, while still offering a bit of quiet contemplation, prompts me to think more about the setting, the scene, and the context.
Minimalism. A dominate subject. High contrast. Rule of thirds. Composition. Complementary colors. Symmetry. Leading lines. Framing. There is a smörgåsbord of rules I can choose from to guide my shooting, to shoehorn my photos into a recognizable and recognized style. But what if I don’t want to. What if I want not just to “break” them but to reject them? Or replace them with a different set of rules/guidelines?
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Rules and guidelines are useful for helping me see things. Francis Bacon realized this centuries ago when he worried about the challenges of inductive investigation. Scientific training depends on some modern version of the dictum about the well-prepared mind being able to see. Photography is no different. The well-prepared photographer is able to see, and to photograph. But photography is not science. There’s no sense of progress, and photographers need not always be beholden to a finite set of rules. We can reject them at will. I think we might benefit from rejecting the rules now and then. Prepare our minds to see chaotic. There can be something soothing and comforting about the mess.
I really want to like this photograph, but something about it bothers me.
If only a person had been standing by the table looking out the window.
It has nothing to do with what’s in the frame and everything to do with what’s not in the picture. Or more precisely: What bothers me is what I had to do to get rid of something that was in the original picture.
I wandered around that corner for quite some time trying to get the right angle that would capture the window, the table, the building, and the sky. There was no ideal spot that isolated the building in just the way I wanted. So I settled for what seemed to be the best composition. Unfortunately, that composition had a massive building dominating the left half of the frame:
If only that skyscraper hadn’t been there mucking up the sky.
Easy enough to remove in post-processing. That’s why they invented the healing and inpainting brushes and the clone-stamp tool. A few minutes with my preferred editing program and the skyscraper was gone. Nobody would be any the wiser.
Except I know what I did. And for me, knowing that I cloned out half the frame ruins the final image. The effort to remove the offending building became an interesting exercise in how much manipulation I can accept. I have no problem with various local adjustments and will make small distractions disappear. But at some point it becomes too much for me. I don’t know where that dividing line falls, and I certainly can’t quantify it. But as a rule of thumb: When the manipulation changes the mood or tone of the photo entirely, as it does in the images here, it is too much for me.
Two caveats: First, my rule of thumb is almost certainly grounded in some combination of a romantic notion of photographic integrity and a preference for one type of labor (walking around and looking for the perfect frame) over another (editing on a computer). Second, this is my rule of thumb for my photographs, and is not meant to apply to anybody else or that person’s photographs.
I was wandering the city that overcast Wednesday afternoon. While not empty, as it had been in the early months of the pandemic, it was not bustling in any normal way. Most offices in the city remained closed or only sparsely staffed. So I took the chance to look for scenes that would capture the emptiness. Glancing up at one corner, I noticed a table next to a window in a low-rise office building.
If only a person had been standing by the table looking out the window.
Nine months ago, I probably could have waited long enough to catch somebody standing at the window, transforming this photo from a minimalist picture into an Edward Hopper-esque photograph.
Even without the person, I really like this photo. It captures the image I had hoped to find that afternoon. I like the loneliness it suggests. The table that earlier this year would have been a meeting place for colleagues to chat and share some gossip, or a place for somebody to take a quick break is today collecting dust, like so many tables and desks in offices everywhere.
