Hi, at the risk of boring people even more I thought I'd write a few lines on my view of the place in photography of the primciples of composition. I hope this will be of some use to anybody who's confused about the apparently polar differences between the positions advocated recently.
It's my opinion that the single most important element in photography is subject matter, although I don't want to defend this position here and now. Composition is in the service of the subject matter and is intended to improve the communication of the subject matter, generally by simplifying and providing various types of signpost to the viewers, indicating what the photographer wants them to look at. Just as Strunk & White, or George Orwell, help writers by providing 'rules', so the 'rules' of composition can help painters and photographers. Just as writers can slavishly follow the rules and still turn out turgid crap, so photographers can follow the rules and turn out bad photos. In general this happens when they've got nothing to say, which brings us back to subject matter. It's my belief that the kind of pictorialism which Mike J. decries in a separate post, and which I also think is horrible, arises when the photographer is enslaved to the composition at the expense of the subject matter, and I think this would be a reasonable definition of pictorialism. In some contemporary photography this is expressed as a deliberate rejection of the classical principles of composition, but the photos are just as bad as the hackneyed pictorialism of the 1950s because the photographer is still the slave of the composition, rather than allowing the composition to serve the subject matter. At its very best, subject matter and composition work together, and we get magnificent work such as Larry Burrows' Vietnam photographs, Tom Stoddart's work in Africa, or Fay Godwin's landscape work. Bob
