11/5 - Framed

Olympus XA, Ilford HP5+

The example above is a little too literal and obvious... let's pretend it has nothing to do with the rest of the post.

I'm just using the word "framed" because I watched the movie 12 Angry Men yesterday, about twelve jurors and a reasonable doubt.  Not that the suspect in the movie was necessarily framed, but the whole movie was a search for the truth.

It's tempting to think of a photograph as the truth, but even when completely unaltered, a photo can only be a part of the truth at best.  It's merely a record just like any other eyewitness account, and just like any eyewitness, the camera can omit important details.

Look at it this way: we live in a 4-dimensional reality (let's not get into String Theory here), with three spatial dimensions and one temporal.  When you take a photo, you freeze it, frame it, and smash it down into a flat, motionless rectangle.  You've removed two entire dimensions of context, and the viewer is left to fill in the blanks themselves.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing.  In fact, you can use it to your advantage in order to tell a compelling story.  Photography removes a lot of things, but if done right, it can remove a lot of noise.  By doing so, you add to whatever it is you've kept in frame.  If you want to take a photo of something, you need to emphasize it.  You need to frame out unwanted, distracting elements while keeping all the things that give context to your subject.  When you fail to do so, you make a boring photograph.  It's just like telling a story.

And just like telling a story, you're allowed to embellish.

This is my favorite thing about photography -- the paradox of something made entirely of the truth being anything but.  Think of all the boring photos of interesting things, and all the interesting photos of the utterly mundane.

The camera is just a hunk of glass and a shutter button.  It doesn't care how pretty the flower is.