Composition and composure.
Clare c1985 Karratha
I think it was in 1979 that I purchased my first SLR camera. It was a Praktica MTL3 and it came with a standard 50mm Pentacon lense. At that time my interest in photography was more about recording family events. My photography was reactive and totally unconstrained by which I mean that I knew next to nothing about the fundamentals of photography. As long as the exposure needle was in the centre of the viewfinder exposure meter, I knew that my shot would at least be correctly exposed. Back then film dictated the ISO which was then labeled ASA (100 for the Kodak colour negative film I used). It was intuitive to me to adjust the shutter speed to adjust exposure and I do recall that I left my lens aperture at f5.6… luck really. I liked this image of my daughter so much I had it enlarged to poster size and framed. I still have it but the colour has faded over the years since then. This is actually a photograph of the photograph re-rendered in black and white.
Much earlier than this, around 1968, I was a student at the newly built Prahran Institute of Technology. I had this naive belief that I wanted to pursue fine arts and I enrolled in the first-year Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. I lasted all of one semester. My parents refused to fund what they considered to be a frivolous excursion into insanity… their ideal was a son who would join the ranks of Lawyers or Doctors, much more fitting socially acceptable professions. I did my best but art supplies and travel to the institute were expensive and I could not sustain this and also pay my rent… I had left home a year earlier and was on the dole and fending for myself in the concrete suburban jungle of Melbourne. The starving artist was my existential reality. This dust mote of history might have played a role in my future photography exploits only in as much as the fundamentals of design I had learned in that first semester stuck with me… a bit like muscle memory for the brain that influenced the framing of the shot… admittedly this is a long bow to draw and it is more likely just pure luck that I jagged the image composition. My daughter, Clare, did not purposely pose for the shot and it was taken off the cuff so to speak.
My adventures in photography evolved over many years. There were more times when the camera gathered dust as I meandered through life’s Gordian knot of tangled paths but I always somehow managed at important times to rescue the camera from its dusty cache and resume taking photos. In the early 90’s I decided my interest was justification to upgrade my camera to a second hand Nikon EM 1979 vintage SLR, a more substantial and solid upgrade to the Praktica which was put out to pasture, I also purchased a second-hand lens, a 50mm f1.4. This became my go-to camera and I started to dabble in taking more interesting shots. I have many negatives but unfortunately, no prints that I can find from that time. A burglary in 1997 resulted in the loss of all my cameras, not many but still a sore blow. Fortunately, I was insured and replaced the ME with Nikon F80 and two autofocus lenses. I also obtained my first digital camera, an Olympus Stylus mju 400 that boasted 4 megapixels of resolution… It was to me at the time an amazing piece of technology. It was tiny and took what I considered lovely pictures. Back then I had not heard of Lightroom and the camera only produced JPG images.
Anyway, I am wandering away from the central theme and by now I have probably put you to sleep. What I really want to talk about is the important fundamental artistic process of composition.
Composition refers to the way things are organised so that we can make some sort of sense of them. When I refer to things, I include all things that we can sense. Mainly things we can hear and see but that doesn’t exclude our other senses as there is an immutable relationship between how things are arranged and their utility. Humans evolved with binocular vision and polyphonic hearing. Our sense of smell and touch are equally important in the array of senses all working in concert to help us make meaning of and navigate through the world around us. Binocular vision allows us to perceive the world and everything in it in three dimensions. Vision allows us to make judgments about scale, volume, and distance as well as identifying things. Sound enhances vision enriching our experience of the world as do all our senses. When our senses are impaired and damaged, our other senses strengthen to compensate for the loss. Blind people have demonstrably more acute hearing and touch sensitivity. When we lose our sense of smell we also lose our sense of taste as these are integral to each other. That is a very challenging and sad state of affairs. Our senses are vital to ensuring our safe survival throughout our lives and with aging, many of us acutely notice their degradation.
From an organic perspective, nature has its own way of organising things. The natural environment left to its own will of course be organised in accordance with the ambient conditions that allow for growth. Vegetation will thrive where there is sunlight and water, even in the arid desert we find either sparse growth or abundant clusters of oases. Forest will have clusters of similar species trees and plants. Wherever we look, nature has organised itself in accordance with the conditions that allow it to thrive. So, there is an organic composition to the world around us all predicated on survival and the prevailing conditions for organic survival. If we stretch our imaginations, we can see this organic order in the universe as we know it. The cosmos is composed of galaxies, stars, and planets. There is a composite order to everything in the natural universe. It goes without saying that there is still so much to discover but we can be certain that what we can sense of the universe and the world we live in, there is organisation and composition.
The English word composition contains the word position. As humans, we have the capability to arrange and re-arrange the physical placement of things. This includes natural as well as man-made things. Animals also do this. Beavers construct dams, birds build nests or mounds, other animals burrow and construct tunnels… all of these activities are about re-arranging things and are all motivated by desires to survive and use our environment. From a purely human perspective, we are endowed with the ability to not only re-arrange our environment for survival but also have the ability to arrange things because their placement in a particular way makes them attractive. The technical term is “aesthetic”, a term that relates to beauty and how beauty is perceived.
The fleeting moment when nature is the master composer.
Lonely Mesquite, Sedona Arizona, November 2014