Separate boxes
Dividing boxes in shots can add a simple layer of interest
There’s more to the Mondrianesque way of composition than arrangement on a flat plane, although this underpins everything. Here’s another copy of one of his paintings, and I suggest a different way of looking at it. Apart from the arrangement of colours – the way they’re balanced dynamically – you can also see them as being held firmly in place by the intersection of black grid lines. They’re each contained in a box and, especially in photography, that can be very useful. But why photography in particular? Because one of the most basic issues in composing a photograph is organizing the natural chaos of the real world into something that resembles a point of view.
To be really basic about this: what separates a meaningless picture taken by say, a security camera, from a shot taken by you or me, is that we’re trying to make an image that’s interesting; something that hangs together, is full of intention and showing just what we want to show.
That’s sort of a statement of intent about composition in general, and even if the picture we’re about to take isn’t high art, but a scene that we like, we still need to get all the parts of it – the elements if you like – into an arrangement. There are many ways of doing this, of course, and one of the most obvious is to position the camera so that one subject, like a figure, is set against a simple part of the background. Imagine, for example, a silhouette against a patch of bright sky or a sunlit wall. Or the opposite, a sunlit figure standing out against an area of shadow. Unless you have no choice, in either case you wouldn’t normally have the figure partly in and partly out. That’s where boxes come in.
Enclosing a subject in a box of some graphic kind puts it in its place, so to speak. Putting two subjects on the same frame each in a box does even better. It adds a graphic overlay – a graphic structure, in other words – and does a good job of organizing the picture.
Here was a case where I started out trying to do one thing, found it wouldn’t work, and then changed completely to a more unusual and very structured kind of picture. This was the weekly market in the old town of Mahébourg on the island of Mauritius, and I was shooting a book that needed to be a little different from the usual tourist publications. In particular, I was after island life, and also the colours of the island, where there’s a tradition of painting houses, shops, buildings and frontages of different kinds with lively colours. This was a narrow passage between stalls, some of which still hadn’t opened and were shuttered in metal, typically brightly painted.
What I wanted, though, was a candid shot of two young guys who were just hanging out in the alleyway, against the colours. That proved impossible, because as soon as they saw me they called out and we entered a bantering talk. I was just too close to get a shot without them looking at me, and I didn’t want that. Then I realized that I could do a different kind of shot by squaring up to the shutters, getting the head of one of them framed in one rectangle, and set that against the artwork advertising judo lessons. More to the point, by making a show of being interested in the artwork, I could take the time to frame carefully. I need him to not know that he was in the photograph, even though I was still talking to him.
That’s where boxes come in: enclosing a subject in a box of some graphic kind puts it in its place, so to speak