Black and White Canvas
Following on from my previous two posts (white Canvas and then Black Canvas) where I discussed the use of snow (white canvas) or black sand (black canvas) as a blank canvas in which to place isolated objects thus creating a simplified composition / photograph, it’s time to talk about incorporating the two.
Of course, the title of this post suggests I’m talking about black and white photography. I’m not. I’m just amalgamating the previous two posts together. If you’ve not read them, then I suggest that you do, as they are really the foundation to where I’m going with all of this.
You see, for me, photography is not about great scenery. It’s about tonal compositions. If we abstract a scene down to the basic building blocks we have tone and form. That’s all we have. We don’t have trees, we don’t have rivers, we don’t have beaches. Forget all those ‘meaningful’ handles we have for things out there in the world. They’re really irrelevant and a massive distraction to what we’re really doing in photography. So what is it that I think we’re trying to do in photography?
Well, a number of things actually. But perhaps the most important one is that we’re trying to make sense of the world, to distill what we see in front of us, down into a digestible, accessible message. We wish to compartmentalise what we see down into something we can understand, and that hopefully everyone else will too. We do this by using maths (spacial distances between related objects within the frame), and by mood (dark tones convey a sense of mystery or low feelings, while brighter tones are more uplifting and transparent).
But ultimately, everything we see within the frame is a tone. It is somewhere between absolute black and absolute white. I honestly wonder sometimes – if we could paint onto the sensors / film of our cameras what we want, we would. We’re just dealing in tones.
So am I suggesting we all start working in black and white? Sort of, but not quite, but yes. I am.
Recently, while I was in Lofoten, one of my clients – John – was working with his D800 camera and I noticed he was working with his live-view screen set to black and white only.
I loved this.
To me it was the perfect summary of what it is we’re trying to do as photographers.
What John was trying to do, was consider the tones in front of him. By removing the colour element, he was able to be more focussed on the tonal relationships before him, and the form they convey throughout the scene. By working with a black and white preview screen, he was abstracting.
Photographs aren’t about scenery, they’re about form and tone.
I began this discussion by presenting a white landscape (snow), to illustrate how we can reduce our photography down to the absolute zero in terms of content to a frame, and if we’re good at it, we can make stronger images. I feel working in blank landscapes such as snow and beach locations can help us fine tune our photography. We start to realise we don’t need much, and everything that is put into the frame should have a purpose.
Like Mark Hollis fromTalk Talk said “Before you play two notes learn how to play one note – and don’t play one note unless you’ve got a reason to play it.” The same holds true for photography. We must distill our image making down to what it really is, and it’s not about scenery, it’s about form and tone. Start with less form and work up from there is my advice.
Thanks for an excellent series of essays, Bruce. They form a very effective and clear distillation of your approach and one which I believe I share through both inclination and association!
I noticed this particularly on my trip to Cuba, from which I’ve just returned. I should say that I didn’t expect to find anything I especially wanted to make photographs from – at least not in the landscape sense – and that proved true (good thing it wasn’t a photography trip!). Everything is too uniform and too green / mid-tone: I found myself really longing for something simple and either black or white. The same issue applies for me making images in the Yorkshire Dales: I find that I *need* snow cover or near-darkness to simplify a complex landscape and be inspired by it – there is a huge difference between lovely countryside and landscapes which inspire composition and support isolation.
I shall re-read these posts: great work as always!
Mike
Comment by MikeDGreen — 27 February, 2013 @ 11:02 am
Hi MIke,
Lovely to hear from you.
As always, you’ve managed to distill what’s taken me three posts to say:
” there is a huge difference between lovely countryside and landscapes which inspire composition and support isolation”
Which is why I get you to edit my books ! hehe :-)
Comment by Bruce Percy — 27 February, 2013 @ 11:05 am
Ho ho – well, I think your version is a great deal more entertaining to read than my synopsis of it ;-)
Comment by MikeDGreen — 27 February, 2013 @ 11:23 am
Hi Bruce – Ever since reading your post “Black Canvas” I have been planning to reply with a comment but everyday life and also wanting to first organize my thoughts intervened. Now I am ready with a comment but that comment may be better suited to the “Black Canvas” post. Here it is anyway:
In your posts on both black and white canvases, you described how each of these tones, to you, is about space. If I understood you correctly, you use these extreme tones to provide the space you want around the objects you then carefully place into your images.
As regards to white, I totally agree and I have begun to learn through observing your images, to do much the same. White (be it snow or fog or brightly lit field, etc.) provides the space in which objets can be placed, helping focus the viewer’s attention through areas of low or no detail.
But as regards to black, I generally (but not always) see it differently. Although I do agree that it is sometimes the case that black provides space (as in your image of the ice seal), I find that more often than not, the inclusion of areas of black (or dark tone) inject a strong emotion into the image, certainly an emotion that is stronger than injected by white (at least to me). That emotion can be fear, or mystery or foreboding or even a sense of excitement of the unknown. And because of this, the inclusion of areas of dark tone generally injects too strong an emotion to simply take on the role of providing space for organization; it provides a lot more than that.
So for me, white provides space. Black also provides space but the emotion it injects means that black, even with low or no detail, and if well placed, acts somewhat like an object itself, and for me, generally a lot more than does white. Thus, I find it far more difficult to organize an image that includes a good amount of black, than to organize with white. Because in effect I have another object in the image.
Comment by Steve N — 28 February, 2013 @ 3:56 am
Hi Steve,
Your post echo’s exactly what I have been saying over the past three posts.
Tones have different feelings/emotions to them, but they can be used in similar ways to convey space in an image. I did say that dark conveys mystery while white conveys uplifting feelings.
The main message in these posts was to consider using large areas of tone in your work to simplify things down. And to consider that this is all you have to play with – tones. So thinking about the quantity of tones and variety that you put within your frame is important.
The reason for writing these posts is also to let people think about their attitudes to different tones. It’s interesting that you seem to consider black as an object. I interpret this as you saying that you find it a barrier more so than anything – a negative emotion – thus barrier – thus object.
It’s up to us as photographers to realise that we have a range of tones to work with. If you feel that black obstructs things (I think this is how you feel about it but I could be putting words in your mouth here), then this would maybe suggest that you create work that tends to avoid darker tones, and therefore seek more uplifting feelings in your images.
Comment by Bruce Percy — 28 February, 2013 @ 9:41 am