Photography Tip .3: Create a World - Develop a Language
Good photos tell stories, and stories don’t live in vacuum. A good story needs a world to live in. Whether this world is based on “the real world” or whether it is a figment of your imagination, it is an essential ingredient, if not the basis, of visual story telling.
Phone Home
What Makes a World?
A world is created in every photo, whether you intended to create one or not. The moment you decide to point your camera to one object or the other, to capture a wide field of view or a narrow one, to wait for a smile or to capture a puzzled “unready” expression, to use extensive color or to go for black and white — the moment you make all these decisions a world is created.
At the end of the day, there is really no such thing as “capturing reality”. Everything you do (as a photographer or as viewer) is involved with filtering reality, interpreting it, and adding numerous layers of experience, feelings, and thoughts. Therefore, I prefer the term “capture a reality“ – one of many possible (or impossible) realities.
Of course not all worlds are created equal. Some are more interesting, some are more intriguing, some are sad, and some are “just” visually attractive.
p(L)ease
A world is defined by everything in it. The world you create in your photo is a combination of colors, composition, atmosphere, and subjects. Just like “the real world” around us, the world you create is sometimes explicit, but sometimes it contains subtle (almost invisible) connections that trigger some feeling in the mind of the viewer. Sometimes a flower is just a flower, but sometimes it is a trigger to a thought about someone you love. The world — any world — is defined by our interaction with it.
And just like the real world, the world created within a photo has rules. You are free to decide that in your self-made world people can fly. You can decide people can be duplicated in your world, and that a person can interact with her clone. You can decide that in your world everything is black and white. As the creator of the world, you are free to define the rules.
A world becomes even more meaningful when it reappears in more than one work. When a world is built one frame at a time in a series of photos, the viewer is drawn into it. She can explore it, get familiar with it, discover new parts of it with every photo, and sometimes even feel even part of it.
A Visual Language
Creating a world in a visual work often means defining a visual language. A consistent visual language can used to express the rules of the world and to set its atmosphere.
From Urbanity, Part I: Antimatter
In Urbanity, Part I and Urbanity, Part II, for example, the post-processing, the colors, and the textures of the scene, all contribute to the atmosphere in the series. In a sense, they are defining the world in which the story takes place. Of course, the subjects I chose, and the way their interact with their surroundings is the heart of the world I created. They too are part of the defining visual language in these series.
In Stream of Consciousness, the blurriness, the tilted position of the camera, and decision to combine three frames into one strip, are all visual elements that helped me create an enigmatic atmosphere that takes the viewer into a mystery journey (see also: There Are No Rules).
From Fons Viate: Portrait of a Street
Fons Vitae tells the story of a street, but although the street exists in the real world, the world created in the series is a fictional creation shaped by the selection of subjects, the contrast, and the lack of color. It is that visual language that detach the world from the raw material it was created from. The portrait of the street is anything but documentary. It is fiction built on fragments of reality
A visual language is a foundation of any photographic world. When using it right it does not stand out by itself — it is rooted deep in the world you create. It defines the world and its rules, and often it affects how visitors to your world will react to it.
– Lidor Wyssocky
Photography Tip .2: Tell a Story
A picture is said to be worth a thousand words. True, but that’s only part of it. The best photos can actually tell a thousand stories.
Broken Wings
Photography Tip .1: Rule #1 - There Are No Rules
There’s nothing like opening a series of articles with shooting yourself in the foot, but the truth must be told: in photography, like in other arts, every rule is meant to be broken. That’s what makes it so interesting.
That’s why this series is not about rules, and not even about guidelines. It’s just about a random collection of tips. A small collection to add to your toolbox and to use if and when they are appropriate.
Back to the one single tip that is a hard rule: there are simply no rules! The web is filled with numerous resources of the technical aspect of photography starting from lighting and exposure and up to composition rules. Some of that information is essential, some of it isn’t. But none of it should be taken as a recipe for creating visual art using a camera.
Some of the best photographic works I’ve seen are, to be blunt, out of focus. Yes, it is important to know how to create a photograph with your subject in focus. It is important to know what affects your ability to do so, and how you can overcome these pitfalls. But, it is at least as important to know when a perfectly focused photo just doesn’t do the job, and when being out of focus sharpens what viewer feel. Breaking “the rules” is sometimes the best option, and the same applies to every “rule” you’ve ever heard in the context of photography.
The 1M$ question is how do you know when to break the rules? The “simple” answer is: “you don’t”. The best thing you can hope for is to feel when it is the right thing to do. There’s simply no formula for that. Feeling is everything.
The good news is that you can grow such a feeling. One method of doing so is to watch the work of others and try to understand how it affects you as a viewer (but that’s for a future post). Another method is simply to experiment, and again to try and analyze what works and what doesn’t. It’s not easy to achieve the needed level of introspection for that, but it’s possible.
Of course, it is important to keep in mind that breaking the rules is not the goal, much like the rules themselves aren’t. The rules, as well as breaking them, are just tools which can help you achieve your goal. It is up to you to find your goal and to understand what serves it best.
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What does this work make you feel? For me (and this is of course an extremely subjective and biased view) the atmosphere in this series of three frames is dark and enigmatic. It open a hatch to many questions and potential stories, and that’s what make it interesting (I hope).
There is more than one element in this work that contribute to this atmosphere. The subjects in each of the frames as well as their background clearly play a role in creating it. But that’s not all. The tilted point of view and the apparent lack of stabilization (see the road lights in the rightmost frame) have a direct influence on the atmosphere and how the viewer perceives it. These elements communicate a sense of urgency and mystery. They help this work tell a better story.
Now here’s a challenge: Can you find a photography tutorial teaching you when tilting your camera in such an unnatural angle works? Can you find a tutorial teaching you when image stabilization is the last thing you would want? Can you find a table associating the amount of vibration in your hand (whether you plan it or not) and the mood it creates? And the most important question: Can you say a photograph taken with a camera titled as if it had fallen, in which the objects seems unclear due to a mysterious vibration is a bad photograph?
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In photography (and in art in general) there is no right or wrong. There is no “by the rules”. Obviously, not everything works for every photo. Something contributing to one work, can look ridiculous on another. There is simply no magic formula for deciding when to go “by the book” and when to write your own book. You have to practice. You have to experiment. You have to be honest with yourself. And you have to feel.
– Lidor Wyssocky
Modern Times: One City — Two Worlds
One thing that always amazes me when I am walking the streets of Tel-Aviv is the fact that I am constantly moving between two different worlds. One is a shiny glass-surrounded world, populating the most successful business people and companies. A world of straight lines reaching to the sky, but at the same time hiding them with their own reflection. A world located only minutes away from the world of the poor and oppressed — the world of houses that are barely standing used as shelter for people who are barely living.
Modern Times is a journey between these two worlds.
Welcome to Fragments, Reloaded
Years ago, right after I bought my first SLR camera, I was eager to find beautiful places and subjects to photograph. I immediately begun touring the classic locations — locations you can see on every postcard - trying to find just the right angle, the right light, and the composition to take yet another postcard-like photo.
It didn’t take long until I felt I ran out of locations. So I switched to cats. They were all so adorable, as if they were created to be photographed. But you can imagine how disappointed I was if by any chance I didn’t find a cat in one of my photo sessions. And when more and more photos looked like “just another cat”, I had to switch to something else. Flowers seemed like a good idea.
After less than a year, I ran out of locations, cats, flowers, and… ideas. I gradually stopped photographing.
A few years later, I opened a dusty album with what I once thought to be my best photos. I found them boring. I stared at them, and they made me feel nothing. They were just a bunch of mute old photos. One photo, however, did catch my eyes. It showed part of a vine - a branch with few leaves on a sunset background. I didn’t understand why I keep staring at it. It seemed so ordinary. But then I saw it.
There it was: a silhouette — a skinny figure holding flowers for his love. The minute I saw it, I knew I am going to start photographing again. I knew I am going to do it differently this time. I realized I didn’t need to look for beautiful subjects or scenery. I just had to open my eyes and look around me.
Since then I walk the streets with my camera looking for fragments of reality — fragments I use as raw material for telling stories. In my works I try to create a door to a world of infinite stories. Stories that exist only in the viewer’s mind.
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Welcome to Fragments, Reloaded. My name is Lidor Wyssocky, and you just happened to come across my humble photography blog.
Fragments, Reloaded is first and foremost my Photoblog (replacing my former photoblog). But with Fragments, Reloaded I decided not only to share my work, but also to share my experience and insights about Photography in general and Visual Story Telling in particular. Therefore a significant part of my new blog is dedicated to articles, tips, and a look behind the scene of my work. Every once in a while I will present the work of a Featured Artist. And, hopefully, that’s only the beginning.
I invite you not only to be a viewer and a reader, but also to take an active part in shaping Fragments, Reloaded. If you have any idea, comment, question, or just some kind words to share, please feel free to post a comment or contact me personally. I promise to respond.
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You are invited to join the ride. And remember: Stories are everywhere. Enjoy.
Lidor Wyssocky