Feeling the frame
After you've decided to make pictures you must decide how your body will frame the experience. That is, where is the edge? The boundary? The horizon between what is in, and what is out? These choices matter, and photography it's the shape of your body that determines how your audience will see what you see. In class we talk about what you want to look at, and about what you want me to know about it. These are the ultimate questions. But buried within them, preceding them, is a skill more primary: can you feel the frame? In The Photographer's Eye , John Szarkowski writes The central act of photography, the act of choosing and eliminating, forces a concentration on the picture edge—the line that separates in from out—and on the shapes that are created by it. In this essay ( read it here ) Szarkowski is trying define the major differences between photographic picture-making and other kinds of picture-making, as he sees them. In one way or another you've most lik...