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The Frame and Content
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來自 Michigan State University 的課程
相机，曝光与摄影
1636 個評分
從本節課中
Picture Decisions: The Vantage Point and Frame
In Module Four we will turn to concepts related to the way photographs look, and how practical decisions that are unique to photography can have dramatic effect in terms of what their creative content might be. We examine the aspects of Vantage Point and Frame as essential choices that must be made by photographers no matter what their ultimate goal for image-making. We also introduce the Peer Review process for paid-Learners, and the ways we can learn about our own ideas through using "terms of art" in written reviews the photographs of fellow Learners.
與講師見面
Peter GlendinningProfessor
Art, Art History, & Design
Mark Valentine SullivanAssociate Professor
Music / Innovation Hub
[MUSIC]
Well we've looked a bit at how the frame affects our composition.
We've looked a little bit about how the frame can affect not only the composition,
but the ways things mean as we put them together within that frame, and
we create a composition that moves our viewer from one place to another.
Let's concentrate a little bit more on that idea of the frame and
its relationship to content.
So in addition to having a really great impact
on the decisions that we make regarding composition in our pictures,
the frame is something that has a really critical role to play
in determining what the content will be as it's conveyed to our viewers.
For this photograph I used something called a large format camera.
It's a camera that's traditionally associated with old school photography,
and it happens to be a camera that held sheets of film, in this case,
8 inches by 10 inches each.
And I use this camera to make a series of landscape photographs
related to the automobile industry and the way the landscape is
informed by the fact that we get around the world in automobiles.
I was interested in a very documentary appearance to the pictures,
but I hoped they would also be seen as very creative expressions.
And for that reason,
the photographs in this series are very much like this one in that there is as
little attention as possible brought to the frame in the picture area itself.
Not a lot of skewed angles,
there's not a lot of things that are abruptly chopped off.
There's not a lot of strange combinations of elements,
strange facts that aren't usually seen together that form some new relationship.
That's not how I was using the frame in that regard.
You can still see though, that there is a lot of attention that's brought to
the frame because of that strange black line that surrounds the image.
Now those lines are a signal to the viewer,
just like they were in the 35 millimeter photographs I showed you,
that the entire sheet of that large format film was used to make the print.
I didn't do any cropping, I didn't eliminate any parts of the picture.
And it's important for me as an artist, in the sense of this composition and
this particular series,
that the viewer understand that I was making pictures that I wasn't cropping,
that they were seeing everything that the film recorded at the moment of exposure.
I've shown you another picture from this series previously,
but I used that black line with 35 millimeter film for
an entirely different series and an entirely different purpose.
This series had to do with random, weird,
strange connections of things that happen to be in the same place at the same time,
but when you framed them in, they all of a sudden achieved some new significance.
And I hope for you that you feel that that black line plays that role here.
It's a way for the photographer to say to the viewer,
hey, I'm not cropping these pictures.
This is just the way the camera saw the image at the moment of exposure.
It's a rule that I follow artistically in this series.
Now that's something that you'll see in a lot of other artists' work,
and the content in this instance has to
do with the photographer's ability to encapsulate those things,
to enclose them within that frame at the moment of exposure.
Deciding what to include and what to exclude,
that's a central decision that we have as photographers and
you can see something of that in this picture.
At the edges of the photograph,
you can see fragments of the charter fishing boats.
They're creating a negative space that surrounds this archway
as we look along the dock.
We've got negative space there, the boat's chopped off.
And as we look down the center of the frame, we can see the people, the people
who are about to go on this fishing charter off there at the end of the dock.
So there's a frame within the frame, but
the frame is creating that negative space and chopping things.
When I shifted my frame to horizontal rather than vertical,
I included more of the scene, more of the boats, more of the dock area.
But that's not necessarily a better picture.
And while we can see more of the people, we can see more of the boats,
we can see more of the context of the place,
it's really not a very exciting photograph, for me anyway.
When I shifted my vantage point off just a little bit more to the left and framed in
more of the entire boat on the left hand side, less of the boat on the right,
I also found an opportunity to include within that frame the seagulls,
which all this time had been flitting about in the sky on the left.
I moved my frame just enough to enclose them as well.
And now they're part of the content.
We can use that frame in another manner, pretty much the manner in the first
photograph I showed you in the cheerleaders, more as a surgical device,
something that chops things in a way that's very dramatic.
Just chops them right off usually in an unexpected place.
Now we'd hate to have a surgeon just chop our head off, or chop our hand off, or
chop our feet off, but that's essentially what I've done in this framing
is chop this guy in an unexpected place.
Now this creates new content not simply by what I choose to show,
but also but what I chose not to show.
It creates a certain tension out of that unusual framing.
For example, what do you think this guy's face looks like?
What do you think he was wearing?
Would it make a difference to you if you knew that he was wearing
army boots as opposed to maybe flip flops or sandals?
Does it make you pay more attention this abstract rough cutting
of the edges to what's in the center, do you see that little
tattoo on his arm which reads the word tiny, T-I-N-Y?
Do you look beyond him?
More at the center of the picture,
something you might not have paid attention to,
if you could see this man's face.
Do you see the people on the carnival ride do you see the smiling
face of the man as he flies by on that carnival ride in the background?
Does this picture raise new issues now?
Now that you can't identify the person in the foreground,
now that they've just become sort of a big, hulking figure,
maybe quite ominous actually in the foreground.
Does this picture all of a sudden become something
other than a photograph about a nice fun day at the carnival?
Does it maybe become something that's joyful, sad,
or scary, or maybe even frightening?
Well, this abrupt act of chopping and the questions that it leaves behind,
that's a really significant element of this concept of the frame, and
you can make it an important part of your photography that you choose to do as well.
When we use that frame to chop cars or
dogs or people that are in the act of movement,
we make that motion of theirs much more pronounced, much more important.
When we use that frame to purposely miss showing them entirely,
we're implying they they are moving so fast that we couldn't capture them.
They're moving so fast that part of them is gone already.
So the figure that's on the left of the frame, their foot is moving on out.
The rest of him's already gone.
The figure on the top right, he's moving so fast that his head's already gone.
Now, we don't see the same ominous kind of impact here as we did with Tiny.
Partly because the figure's not moving towards us, but it's more about motion,
and about the way that that frame can imply motion and not normal motion either.
Maybe something that's a little bit odd, because the flash that I used,
the strobe on the camera, wasn't enough to cover the full frame of the scene.
One thing that's important for you to remember is that
at the moment of exposure, you are the only person who is capable of
perceiving the connections that are enclosed within that frame at that moment.
You are the only person.
You are at the exact vantage point looking at the exact frame, and this gives you
a control of the world around you that really can be quite transformative.
That can allow you to take photographs using people, animals,
other sentient beings, and make photographs of them
in a way that they might never expect, and that they might be quite surprised to see.
These two men, again, were in Bradford, England, outside the media museum.
They had no idea that I was making a photograph using these strange circles,
using their movement, and enclosing them within a frame that would capture them
altogether, create a new relationship, and create an element of strangeness.
In this photograph, from a gallery, in Arles, France, during the Rencontres
d'Arles festival, there was a woman observing a slideshow,
and you can see her in the left hand side of the frame at the top.
You can also see her reflected in the mirror
in which the slide show is presented, and further, you can see
a reflected image from that mirror cast on the ground in the foreground.
It's a very confusing frame to look at without having been there.
And that's one of the things I love about it as an example of how the frame
defines the content, and how people who are in the scene have no idea
how your judgement in framing them within a certain space and time is going
to result in a transformation of who and what they are, and what they might mean.
Is this a picture about, well maybe about old age contrasted with youth?
Maybe about the present.
Maybe about the past.
Maybe about the future.
That's how I see the content.
I'm sure it's not how the woman was experiencing that exhibit.
Well, of course in this picture, the dogs probably didn't care very much whether
they were in the photograph or not, and if I showed the photograph to the dogs,
it would make no sense to them whatsoever anyway.
But photographing the shopkeeper with the dogs, probably
he didn't realize that I was making a picture that combined him with them.
And he might be very surprised at the content that might arise based on him,
his body language, the body language of the dogs, and the possibilities for
content that might be either, it's a lazy hot day in Athens,
Greece, or my goodness, what's wrong with the dogs?
What has this man done?
Probably he wasn't expecting that content, and probably not thinking about it at all,
but I think it's in the picture.
I'm pretty confident that the gondoliers who are around their
boats in the distant foreground here in Venice, Italy, of course,
they probably didn't realize that I was framing them and their boats in
to create a connection between the vibrant blue of their boat covers and
the vibrant blue of the image of the man that's suspended in this very
weird position, a billboard above them, to create a photograph that was
both about Venice and maybe not about Venice at the same time.
Juxtaposing these facts, bringing things together in a new way, things that aren't
ordinarily seen together, this is really an essential aspect of what we're doing.
We're creating new relationships in all of these situations that I've been describing
where sometimes the person, sometimes the thing,
sometimes the dog, nobody other than us can see
the connections that we're making because we're framing these things in together.
Here we've got two very contemporary looking young women staring off at
a castle in the distance, maybe thinking about themselves as maybe princesses back
in the ancient days when the castle was a vibrant active part of the community.
The picture asks us to connect with their thoughts.
What are they thinking about?
And how does it relate to that landscape that they're seeing in the distance?
Similarly, in this museum in Leon, France, dedicated to the Lumiere
brothers who invented cinematography and a wonderful color photography process as
well, the cinematography they invented in 1895, actually.
Their photograph is on the wall adjacent to an entryway to a courtyard and
at just the right framing for all the world you could see it
as the Lumiere brothers just waiting for somebody to walk through.
We've talked about that idea of a frame within a frame.
And this is a pretty good example of that, I think not only in terms of
compositional aspects of how the frame is framing in another frame
within which there's another scene, but in terms of content.
And that's one of the things that we do with a frame is creating these various
relationships and sometimes they're positive and
negative space relationships like in this picture.
Here we've got, it was actually a wall erected to keep
pedestrians from a construction site.
And they had the bright idea of painting it with these beautiful leaves and
creating a space through which people could view this construction scene inside.
It's quite an interesting thing in terms of the patterns,
in terms of the compositional elements, but
I think also is way to see the construction site in a new way.
It is a content element as well.
If you've been to Athens, Greece, along with visiting the Acropolis, you
probably also visited the park where the temple of Olympian Zeus is to be found,
and you probably visited it during the day.
But if you go back at night, you might find an opportunity as I did,
to see that place that's now locked up, you can't go in there,
it's a little park, a massive big wrought iron fence around it with an interesting
pattern that sort of relates to that temple of Olympian Zeus as well.
And you might find an opportunity as, in this picture, to use that frame to
enclose another frame within your frame, and create new relationships as well.
Light and shadow are functioning a little bit differently in this scene from
a resort in Mexico, as a contrast to the night scene in Athens, Greece.
Here we have a bright, bold, hot, daylight scene, but photographed from
inside a building, seeing these two windows and the interplay between them.
The two frames within the frame, so to speak, the effect of seeing a separate
world, beyond the walls, comparing it to the world within the walls, the light and
shadow in each of them, it can raise all sorts of concepts in the viewer's mind.
One of the critical things that the frame addresses and creates,
actually, is negative space.
And negative space is simply the space that surrounds
what the nominal subject of your picture is.
In this case, if we say the subject of the photograph is the sailboat,
well there is a heck of a lot of negative space around it, and it is actually,
but that vast emptiness now, because of the way it is framed,
because of the relationship of the positive space,
the sail boat, and the negative space, the area around it,
because of that relationship, we got an entirely new content,
a content that relates to the emptiness, the vastness, the mystery of the sea.
In other instances, that negative space can become
a part of a jigsaw puzzle, so to speak.
Here we can see that element of the sky, and it's so flat and so
consistent in color that it becomes really more like an abstract puzzle piece
that's fitting together with the other abstract puzzle pieces of the buildings.
Well, why did this happen?
It happened because the frame was used to enclose a specific
area that's very narrow, that doesn't allow us to see the entirety of anything.
And out of that lack of entirety, that fragmentation, comes a new content.
Another instance in which the negative space is transformed by the frame,
also a frame within a frame, is a photograph such as this one
made in a park, laying on a bench, looking up into the sky.
I happen to be in Arles, France again.
And in this picture, I framed in the sky with the trees, and framed the tree
elements with the frame itself, creating this diagonal shape that moves
from upper left to lower right, moving the viewer from one place to the other, but
also flattening everything because of the exposure, and the effect of that
fragmentation of the frame, that beautiful sky, the beautiful trees,
all of a sudden because of the way they're framed, take on an entirely new context.
Well I didn't make this picture,
but someday I'd like to get into this location.
Up there on the moon, looking at the vastness of that empty sky,
that empty outer space above, the vast emptiness of the landscape around,
and the astronaut, the buggy, the American flag in the center.
Here's a picture that creates a content where negative space is something that's
actually equally attractive and
equally rich in content as the positive space itself.
So look for opportunities to work with this negative space, whether it has to do
with emptiness and void, or content as rich as we see here.
Look at that frame and all of its many, and
sundry aspects as a way to affect the content of your pictures.
[MUSIC]
