amolitor
TPF Noob!
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- May 18, 2012
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I am as guilty as anyone of suggesting that one should look at graphic design ideas when trying to understand photography. The more I dig in to this, the more I think this might actually be a terrible idea.
Take the business with lines: horizontal lines suggest stability, vertical lines suggest instability (or, if you poke around the web, it turns out they can suggest pretty much anything you like: power, stability, peace, energy, strength, and so on).
In graphic design this makes sense. Well, the business with "vertical lines can suggest anything at all" but that does not seem to appear in discussions of actual graphic design, only on ad-baiting "pep ur snaps up" photography sites. In graphic design, lines are actual things on the page, you're actually drawing a line. A horizontal line is a real thing in your design, and the fact that it IS horizontal makes it, in fact, look like it can't fall over. It looks like it's lying down. This sort of thing is also going to be true about an abstract photograph, which one could argue is just a graphic design anyways.
A photograph of real things doesn't actually have any lines, it has things. It has trees, not vertical lines. It has railroad tracks, not horizontal lines. Even if there is some suggestion of "repose" purely in the horizontal line an object suggests, the actuality of the object will dominate. A person lying down appears to be at rest because he or she is at rest, not because he or she is parallel to some horizontal line. A thing that is powerful will look powerful because it is powerful, not because it is in a vertical orientation. The diagonal line on the edge of a 4500 year old pyramid no more suggests "dynamism" and "action" than a picture of a snail.
The chain of reasoning from:
1) such and such a feature in a graphic design tends to evoke such and such a response
2) this feature in your photograph bears a superficial resemblance to that feature of the graphic design
3) therefore this feature of your photograph will tend to evoke the same response
strikes me as little better than sympathetic magic.
Take the business with lines: horizontal lines suggest stability, vertical lines suggest instability (or, if you poke around the web, it turns out they can suggest pretty much anything you like: power, stability, peace, energy, strength, and so on).
In graphic design this makes sense. Well, the business with "vertical lines can suggest anything at all" but that does not seem to appear in discussions of actual graphic design, only on ad-baiting "pep ur snaps up" photography sites. In graphic design, lines are actual things on the page, you're actually drawing a line. A horizontal line is a real thing in your design, and the fact that it IS horizontal makes it, in fact, look like it can't fall over. It looks like it's lying down. This sort of thing is also going to be true about an abstract photograph, which one could argue is just a graphic design anyways.
A photograph of real things doesn't actually have any lines, it has things. It has trees, not vertical lines. It has railroad tracks, not horizontal lines. Even if there is some suggestion of "repose" purely in the horizontal line an object suggests, the actuality of the object will dominate. A person lying down appears to be at rest because he or she is at rest, not because he or she is parallel to some horizontal line. A thing that is powerful will look powerful because it is powerful, not because it is in a vertical orientation. The diagonal line on the edge of a 4500 year old pyramid no more suggests "dynamism" and "action" than a picture of a snail.
The chain of reasoning from:
1) such and such a feature in a graphic design tends to evoke such and such a response
2) this feature in your photograph bears a superficial resemblance to that feature of the graphic design
3) therefore this feature of your photograph will tend to evoke the same response
strikes me as little better than sympathetic magic.