Michael Freeman
We regard patterns very highly, but what happens when we break a pattern with a solitary subject sticking out?
Michael explains how an image that shows someone standing out of a crowd results in an image that stands out from the crowd…
I was hoping someone or something would pass by in the lower left of the frame to give me that X factor
There’s a time-honoured creative technique, one that goes beyond photography, in which you present a lot of identical subjects… but one of them, just one, is somewhat different in a manner that draws a viewer’s eye. It breaks out of the pattern, and in doing so manages to really stand out from the rest of the composition. New York photographer Jay Maisel nailed this idea when he said, “As people, we love pattern. But interrupted pattern is more interesting.”
One of the most striking commercial examples of this – which I’m not showing here, but which is easy enough to check up on – was an ad in 1982 by a very successful agency, Bartle Bogle Hegarty. It was for Levi jeans, who were jumping ahead of the game with black jeans rather than blue, and the agency proposed an image of a herd of white
sheep moving in one direction with a single black sheep in the midst heading in the opposite direction. The headline ran, “When the world zigs, zag.” Not a pair of jeans in sight, and a great success. More than 30 years later the agency still uses the image for its own branding. The odd man out has cult appeal, maybe partly because the eye finds it refreshing to see a single break in a pattern, but maybe partly also because it invokes the idea of the rebel, and that’s what the agency was picking up on.
For my book The Life of Tea, I was shooting at a tea estate in Sri Lanka, and at one point in the day the pickers, all women, stood in line with their baskets of picked tea. As you can see from the ‘Before’ picture, I went with a classic way of dealing with this, which is to shoot with a telephoto from a slight angle so that the figures make an organized row.
Find that X factor
Okay, that’s all well and good, but it needed something else, it needed that something extra… I was hoping someone or something would pass by in the lower left of the frame to give me that X factor. Then, one young woman near the middle leaned forward to look out, and this action transformed the moment. She breaks the line yet still remains part of it, and the eye goes directly to her in an instant.
Creatively the breakout, of which this is just one example, is almost always satisfying, not only because it gives the viewer a point of attention, ‘but because it sets up a contrast of one against many – the rebel, if you will. Visually, as Jay Maisel says, we sort of like patterns – or ‘field images’ in art-speak, because they extend to the frame edges and resemble a field of, well, stuff. But oh, how much more interesting when the pattern is broken by one unit behaving differently.
It’s an ‘idea with traction,’ as they might say in advertising, with the added attraction of it being a creative flair in photography and not being easy to pull off in real life. A line of guardsmen at the annual Trooping of the Colour is highly trained not to break their pattern and give you a neat, high-precision photograph. That is unless one of them faints in the heat,
of course, which could give you a great image. Or how about masses of sunflowers all facing the sun, as they do, but with one facing in the completely opposite direction? I’m not sure what that could advertise, though there must be a long list of candidates. But executing such a shot? Now that would be the real challenge.
Yes, you can set up a pattern-breaking photograph – that black sheep image didn’t happen by pure coincidence – but, that does remove part of the fun. If you come across it in the real world, however, even if less tidily, it gets you extra creative points. A basic technique is to first find and frame the pattern, and telephoto lenses are often good for this because they home in on details and also compress perspective. Then all you have to do is wait, anticipate, and be lucky.