Illustrated discussion

Discussion of exam paper - Framing Devices (chosen topic) including artist research complete and illustrated. (Add One or two image examples from each photographer within the topic and discuss how their work relates to the exam topic)

Definition: Framing is actually defined by wikipedia as ‘a technique used to bring focus to a subject’.  So, like more advanced compositions like leading lines, or golden triangles, using elements to frame your subject can really make an image a bit more interesting and engaging, and make your subject really stand out.

Framing Devices: 

Using architectural elements is probably the most obvious way to frame a subject. Using doorways, window frames, archways, framed mirrors. Elements that are permanent to the environment in which you place your subject. it can offer a fly on the wall kind of feel, like like the viewer is peeking in on an activity.

Trees often have a way of wrapping over a subject and framing the subject if placed just right. Photographing through grasses, flowers, or bushes can often bring more attention to your subject by creating a blurred foreground. The eye tends to go toward the in focus areas of the images first, while the added dimension adds depth to the photo to make it more interesting.

Framing as something that closes off part of the frame. If part of your frame is covered, the viewer’s eye will go toward the more open space, which hopefully is where your subject will be placed. Look for shapes in play areas. There are tons of opportunities on playgrounds.

Techniques:

Architectural elements: 

Using doorways, window frames, archways, framed mirrors. Elements that are permanent to the environment in which you place your subject. Framing images and subjects using the architecture of the setting brings a little more interest to the image. It also gives you a fly on the wall kind of feel, like you are peeking in on an activity

Environmental elements: 

Photographing through grasses, flowers, or bushes can often bring more attention to your subject by creating a blurred foreground. The eye tends to go toward the in focus areas of the images first, while the added dimension adds depth to the photo to make it more interesting.

Framing using light/shadow:

Using the available light or lack of to frame your subject is also effective. It is a more subtle approach to framing, but it is a beautiful way to highlight not only your subject, but gorgeous light.





Eugene Atget:

The life and the intention of Eugene Atget are fundamentally unknown. A few documented facts and a handful of recollections and legends provide a scant outline of the man. He was born in Libourne, near Bordeaux, in 1857, and worked as a sailor during his youth. From the sea he turned to the stage, with no more than minor success. Aged forty he quit acting, and after a tentative experiment with painting Atget became a photographer, and began his true life's work. Until his death thirty years later he worked quietly at his calling. 

To a casual observer he might have seemed a typical commercial photographer of the day. He was not progressive, but worked patiently with techniques that were obsolescent when he adopted them, and very nearly anachronistic by the time of his death. He was little given to experiment in the conventional sense, and less to theorizing. He founded no movement and attracted no circle. He did however make photographs which for purity and intensity of vision have not been bettered. 

Atget's work is unique on two levels. He was the maker of a great visual catalogue of the fruits of French culture, as it survived in and near Paris in the first quarter of this century. He was in addition a photographer of such authority and originality that his work remains a bench mark against which much of the most sophisticated contemporary photography measures itself. Other photographers had been concerned with describing specific facts (documentation), or with exploiting their indivisual sensibilities (self-expression). Atget enconpassed and transcended both approaches when he set himself the task of understanding and interpreting in visual terms a complex, ancient, and living tradition. 

The pictures that he made in the service of this concept are seductively and deceptively simple, wholly poised, reticent, dense with experience, mysterious, and true.

John Szarkowski:

John Szarkowski was born December 18, 1925, Ashland, Wisconsin, U.S. and died July 7, 2007, Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He was an American photographer and curator who served as the visionary director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City from 1962 through 1991 and demonstrated that photography is an art form rather than just a means to document events. He took his first job at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where he worked as a museum photographer. He exhibited his own photographs there in 1949. He moved to Buffalo, New York, in 1951 to teach photography at the Albright Art School, and from there to Chicago. In 1962 he became director of MoMA’s photography department.

During his tenure at MoMA, Szarkowski curated 160 thought-provoking exhibitions and helped launch the careers of prominent photographers Diane Arbus, William Eggleston, Lee Friedlander, andGarry Winogrand and expand the reputations of Walker Evans and Robert Frank, among others. Many of his exhibitions presented groundbreaking theories on photography, its capacity as a visual medium, and its place in the museum and the larger art world. 

A gifted photographer in his own right, Szarkowski was renowned for his landscapes, especially the ones he photographed in the 1960s in the Quetico-Superior wilderness between Minnesota and Ontario. His work was featured in his 1956 book on Louis Sullivan as well as in The Face of Minnesota(1958).

It seems that the focus points in this image are the buildings, the white farm house on the right hand side of the image and the longer building on the bottom left corner of the image. He has used the natural frames of the grass 

Saul Leiter:

Leiter moved to New York in 1946 intending to be a painter and through his friendship with the abstract expressionist Richard Pousette-Dart he quickly recognised the creative potential of photography. Though he continued to paint, exhibiting alongside Philip Guston and Willem de Kooning, Leiter’s camera became like an extension of his arm and mind, an ever-present interpreter of life in the metropolis.

The notion of the ‘New York street photographer’ was born at the same time, in the late-1940s. But Leiter’s sensibility, comparable to the European intimism of Bonnard, a painter he greatly admires, placed him outside the confrontations with urban anxiety associated with photographers such as Robert Frank or William Klein. Instead, for him the camera provided an alternative way of seeing, of framing events and interpreting reality. He sought out moments of quiet humanity in the Manhattan maelstrom, forging a unique urban pastoral from the most unlikely of circumstances.

None of Leiter’s contemporaries, with the single and partial exception of Helen Levitt, assembled a comparable body of work in colour. The lyricism and intensity of his vision come into fullest play in his eloquent handling of colour: to the rapid recording of the spontaneous unfolding of life on the street, Leiter adds an unconventional sense of form and a brilliantly improvisational, and frequently almost abstract, use of found colours and tones. Leiter’s visual language of fragmentation, ambiguity and contingency is evoked in Saul Leiter: Early Colour by one hundred subtle, painterly images that stretched the boundaries of photography in the second half of the twentieth-century.

This image captures two (presumably) men seated on a train at night. Saul Leiter has used the street lights outside and the darker lighting on the train to shoot silhouettes of men in hats sitting by windows. Linking this image to the idea of framing devices, Leiter has purposely shot this image from an angle that frames the man on the left within the window frame next to him  almost perfectly and frames the second man within the corner of the window he is seated next to. Additionally he has used depth of field as the forefront of the image is not in focus as the silhouettes of the men are the main focus of this image.