Conceptual Impact
In the last blog, we discussed how lighting decisions can influence conceptual impact. In this blog post, I want to continue on with the idea of the relationship between composition/framing and concept. As you may have noted as you look at my website, there are a lot of landscapes, or human elements in landscape images on the site. Many of these photos have the usual ground/horizon/sky structure usually associated with this genre, but a substantial amount of the work is horizonless, whether the image be of a large expansive area or a smaller more intimate space.
So, the question arises- When Does It Conceptually Make Sense To Lose the Sky in An Image? I am far from the first photographer to compose without horizon line, but I suspect my motivations may be different in certain ways. Commonly, I am more concerned with a specific process going on in an environment, than I am in describing how a place merely looks. Sometimes it is more affective to place the viewer inside the process than view it from the outside in.
To that end I want to discuss the photo of Wildflowers After Fire above to help us develop these ideas further. However, before we discuss that photo, I want us to take a quick look at a photo named Their First Murder by Weegee. While I rarely photograph people, I like all kinds of photography, and the conceptual strategy Weegee employed in this photo directly relates to the landscape photo above. The obvious thing in this photo is the dead person is nowhere to be seen. He is outside the frame of the photo, and the actual concept being explored in the photo is the reaction of the living to a gruesome event. What is so critical here is that murder is being discussed without the victim even being present in the photo. This photo never tells us WHO DIED?
In the landscape photo above, I had little, if any, desire to create a site specific landscape of a scorched valley in the Sierra Nevada slowly coming back to life. My goal was to illustrate how life arises from death in an almost explosive fashion. To that end, I decided to NOT answer the question of How Extensive the Flower Bloom Was?, nor How Burned Out Was the Valley?, and instead composed the image with wall to wall lupine and a few scorched branches way in the right upper corner of the photo. Much like the Weegee photo which never tells us who was murdered, our wildflower photo never answers the usual landscape questions. The photo is based upon exclusion rather than inclusion. The goal of the photo was to illustrate a specific natural process.
