Heavily present in Henri Cartier-Bresson’s work is his emphasis on scale and proportion. One image that I enjoyed is The Decisive Moment (Simon & Schuster, 1952) where the only subjects present are a man and a cat face to face sitting on the street, completely dwarfed by the scale of Manhattan’s apartment buildings. One way I plan on using scale to do my book photography is to scale my subjects whether they be structures or train cars in a way that emphasizes their importance or relevance in the context of modern life and the outdoors.
I found Lucy Gans’ Letters From My Mother really interesting and intriguing into the way in which she was able compile the scans of photographs atop each other with different opacities and then incorporate herself into the work. The use of only three different color shades also works greatly to create a calm feeling piece while the subject is holding her head as an exclamation of surprise. From this, I would like to explore and see if there is a dichotomy that I can create between my subjects using different hues and shades which fit each other but not the mood of the image.
One aspect heavily present from Then They Came for Me was the use of a vanishing point. In many photographs – their subjects are aligned on one side of the image while the vanishing point is present which also contributes to the scale of the image. This is especially present in the image from Owens Valley by Ansel Adams and the image from Woodland by Dorothea Lange.
From AIR by Vincent Laforet, although I don’t have access to a helicopter, it would still be worth it to explore and research ways that I could get aerial views of my subjects. Perhaps that means looking for subjects under overpasses or next to tall buildings from which I could photograph them. Also, this could be played upon in a totally opposite way in which I try to frame my shots from a bug’s eye point of view instead of from a bird’s eye point of view. As long as it’s not from a human eye’s point of view, I feel that the effect would be similar and could add an interesting quality to the image.
