Design the viewing experience
Planning comes in to play prominently when framing reveal shots
The way in which all reveal shots are supposed to work is like this: the viewer starts by seeing one thing that’s interesting enough to hold the attention for at least a short while, then starts to notice there is more to the image than first thought, eventually coming across a subject of interest that was not obvious at first glance.
This is one reason why this kind of photograph stands its best chance when it’s hung on a gallery wall, inviting people to approach and see what it’s about. When it’s not at all clear what is going on, or why, the viewer can be persuaded to go on looking for some more time. He or she will begin to find things. You’re inviting the viewer to spend a little more time with the image, so they’ll discover something else, you’ve embedded in the frame. Instead of rapid communication, you’re aiming for the equivalent of a punchline delivered after the viewer has already entered the image. Not surprisingly, it helps to have a moment to yourself in order to work out how that sequence of viewing might work. This is the kind of compositional planning that takes time and thought, so it’s not really in the same category as quick-reaction shots like on the previous pages, even though they both share the same basic idea.
Unlike the previous shot from a helicopter, though coincidentally also in
Sudan (I was shooting there, on and off, for two years for my book Sudan: The Land and
the People), there was time to consider and plan. The location was the ruin of the Egyptian temple of Amenhotep III at Soleb, a very special and little-visited site on the Nile, a few days’ drive north of Khartoum across the Nubian desert. Archaeologically fascinating – it’s from 1386-1349 BCE and still has, as you can see, a massive architrave intact on top of two columns. I covered it in a documentary way from different viewpoints, but also had the idea for a different kind of shot. At the time, I was interested in how Orientalist painters handled this kind of subject, which was generally romantically, a lot of atmosphere and the ruin dominating, but with small figures somewhere. I wanted the figures to come last in the way a viewer would see it, and so I framed the shot like this, with a glimpse of a passing trail tucked into the lower-right corner. It was then just a matter of waiting until someone passed by.
The plan was to first hit the eye with solid mass of the central pillar, cropped top and bottom and silhouetted in the middle of the frame. Then, with luck (planning how someone sees a picture is never certain), the eye would go left to the light. I’d deliberately put the tripod where the sun would be cut into by the architrave, and kept having to shift the viewpoint slightly as I waited. From here, again with a pinch of luck, the eye would find only one other place to go to – the lower right, the only part of the scene that wasn’t a silhouette, to discover the miniscule figures.
If you can pull a reveal successfully, you get the audience to stay longer with your photography – always good. But there is a risk that if you don’t design it effectively, the audience won’t get it at all. It’s an uncertain balancing act, because if you hide the thing-to-be-revealed too well such as by making it too small or poorly lit, odds are the viewer will get bored and move on. In classical painting, which this kind of shooting relates to, you then get what the art historian Ernst Gombrich called “traffic accidents on the way between artist and beholder”. It’s a constant risk, but can be reduced by presenting the photograph as large as possible.