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Re: esoteric question
Chris,
The best way that I have found to teach composition is to emphasis visual
geometry. Gestalt psychology is the best conceptual explanation for this. It
synchronizes well with research in brain hemisphere theory, although you
don't have to get into that to understand gestalt concepts.
I tell my students that composition is the process (not act, process) of
arranging shapes and forms within the edges formed by the frame of their
camera. Every photographic composition begins and ends on the edges of the
frame, and the shape of that frame is important. The process continues by
selection. That is, we decide what goes into the frame and what stays out.
In one very important sense, then, composition is a point in the larger
process of making photographs when the photographer accepts responsibility
for what they are choosing to include in their image.
The principle objective is to teach them to see their subject as the
collection of shapes and forms they actually are, and actually will be, once
that visual information is reduced to a two dimensional plane. In a
photograph--a face, an interior of a room, a landscape, and event--is simply
a collection of shapes and other information that we recognize and agree on.
This lies at the very heart of what Ansel Adams called previsualization (a
much larger and more eloquent concept that simply deciding what shades of
gray you might want in your print).
Adams' concept of previsualization, the foundation of his Zone System, was
learned from Alfred Stieglitz. Stieglitz called his concept the
"Equivalency." Adams acknowledges this lineage in the preface of his first
Portfolio I.
Composition is about choice, first, then the refinement of visual geometry
skills. It is, as Adams so thoroughly understood, enhanced by a
photographer's craftsmanship. Classic rules of composition, whatever their
origin might be, only make deep sense within that context. Otherwise, they
are just formulas.
Hope this helps!
Bill Kennedy