Assignment #2

Assignment #2

due May 31^st

The Whole of the Frame. 30 pictures.

"At bottom, photography is a system of visual editing," John Szarkowski wrote in his introduction to William Eggleston's Guide. His declaration was correct--photographing means throwing a lot of stuff away. Too often, though, we end up with more than we expected. Photography is not the same as putting something in a jar.

Photographers have dealt with this problem in four ways. The first, most common, and dumbest way has been to ignore it—to center one subject and hope the rest of the picture stays quiet or pretty. The second has been to flee into the studio—a good option but often a dead-end. The third option has been to cut-and-paste the best parts of very similar pictures together, either with scissors or Photoshop. This option is great in cases of emergency, but like the studio, it tends to lead to predictable concepts. But the fourth option, the most difficult, has been for the photographer to change the way he looks for a picture. To see not one subject in the center, but the potential ensemble of subjects in a frame.

Robert Frank probably did not say this but he should have—that in his own work there are almost always three things going on, at least three things, that together produce an unexpected idea that each could not alone. Sometimes Frank's pictures had five or six things.

Szarkowski also noted that when someone told William Eggleston that his compositions seem to radiate from a central, circular core, Eggleston said that it must be true, since all of them were based on the Confederate flag. Though Eggleston's pictures did seem very simple, he actually invented a way to make himself the third thing. It was a brilliant, subtle move, one that would wed private meanings to American color art photography as public meanings had been to black and white, but not something you or I should try right now.

Instead, we are to make 28 pictures in which we use the whole frame, not just the center. Be very, very mindful of the edges of your picture, which are more important to the photograph than they are to any painting or drawing. Also keep in mind the idea of at least "three things." Not one, and preferably not two.

Do not forget your camera.