Rectangular relationships
When using rectangles to frame up a shot, try to ensure that there is some kind of parallel
The last shots, on the previous pages, were about boxing in subjects with a rectangular grid. That kind of setting is obviously not very common, but moving on from there it’s possible to get a similar effect with just a suggestion of a rectangular structure. If you start with one obvious rectangle, careful framing from an exact viewpoint can fool the eye into thinking that there’s a full grid. It also usually needs help from other sources, particularly, and in this case, lighting.
One constant in all of these images is that they are exact, level and frontal. There are no diagonals, which when translated into photography means no keystoning, and if you think about this, it’s not at all common. Almost all photographs contain angles of some sort, because the world is three-dimensional and not so neat and ordered. Standing directly in front of a flat upright subject and keeping the camera level is a very strong way of creating order, and while it also runs the risk of being rigid and less dynamic or exciting (think of the contrast with a tilted wide-angle shot that’s full of diagonals going up, down, everywhere), it definitely has a special character.
In this shot, from my Sudan book, the rectangular structure is less striking than the slightly bizarre poster and the juxtaposition between this and the stallholder, but it works only because of the Mondrian-inspired squares and asymmetry. The setting is the weekly market called Souq Libya on the outskirts of Omdurman, across the river Nile from Khartoum. What came first was the slight sense of the ridiculous in the contrast between poster and man.
Normally I’m wary of making street art and graphics the main subject because, well, it’s too easy, quite apart from the fact that it feels like just photographing someone else’s work rather than creating your own image from scratch, but I make a few exceptions, and this was one of them. I had to wonder what a blue-eyed baby is doing holding a landline phone in Sudan, and the man underneath made an obvious connection, from his perfect position to his hand, empty but also in a similar position. And the lighting, which was late in the day, was sharp – the kind of light that makes you go looking for something to use it on.
I was using a medium telephoto, 180mm, which gave me a little breathing space in composing the shot, as the man hadn’t seen me. While there’s only one rectangle – the poster – this viewpoint and framing it suggests other rectangles to go with it. One is of the man, spotlit by the sun in such a way that he’s isolated out of black. The thin edges of cables on the left and some textile on the right turns them into rectangles, too. Ultimately, from a starting point of just one large square, we’ve created a Mondrian-style arrangement.
In this shot, from my Sudan book, the rectangular structure is less striking than the slightly bizarre poster and the juxtaposition between this and the stallholder