4 Reasons To Use Abstraction In Photography Plus 20 Experiments To Try

Composition  Comment
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1 Structure Clarified

2 Process Detailed 

3 Concept Visualized

4 Pattern Created

5 Extreme Simplification

 

Abstraction

To one degree or another, every photograph is abstract. At a minimum, photographs are flat rather than three-dimensional. Some photographs are more graphic than others. And the origins of a few photographs are virtually unrecognizable. Answering to what degree a photograph is abstract, how it is abstract, and why it’s abstract will help you understand more about it and its creator’s intentions – this might be you.

Definitions

So what does abstract mean? First used in the 14th century the word abstract comes from the Latin abstrahere meaning to draw away (ab = away + trahere = to pull) and was used to mean “withdrawn or separated from materials objects or practical matters.” As a noun abstract means a condensed piece of writing. As an adjective or adverb the meanings of abstract are widely divergent; general, summarized, distilled, not specific, qualitative, disassociated, nonmaterial, theoretical, geometric, formal, non-representational, not applied, unreal, transcendent, abstruse … The list goes on until the meaning of abstract becomes diffuse to the point of being more suggestive than specific. Long used in fields as diverse as religion, philosophy, and science, surprisingly, the word abstract wasn’t widely used in the arts until the early 1900s during the modernist movement, when painters and sculptors departed from realism and even representation, which was in part a reaction to photography.

How Abstract Is It?

When looking at images it’s useful to ask a number of questions. Beginning to answer these questions will tell you a great deal about both individual images and their relationships to other images, even if the answers you arrive at are neither definitive nor complete. Sometimes the toughest questions are the most rewarding. They keep giving and giving, for a long time, perhaps even a lifetime.

Regarding abstraction, try these questions.

 “On a scale of 1-10, how abstract is it?” It may be only a little or it may be a lot.

“What’s abstract about it?” While some images are entirely abstract, in other images only certain aspects may be abstract and this may be partial or complete. What’s done and how it’s done can direct attention in specific ways, describe particular graphic qualities, and display interpretation.

“What kind of abstraction is it?” Though they may all coexist in a single image, conceptual, minimal, and non-representational, are three very different qualities, which often identify intent.

 Intent brings us to the most important and often most difficult question to answer. “What purpose does abstraction serve?” This is essential to answer before asking “Is the means appropriate for the end?” and “How well is it done?”

How long visual attention is sustained depends on whether the stylization has purpose, how well it serves the message, and how well it’s done.

The Many Uses Of Abstraction

Abstraction can serve many functions; it can stimulate, structure, inform, and express.


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The Top 5 Reasons To Blur Your Images

Technique - Blurring  Comment
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View more of Arduina Caponigro’s images here.

One of the best things about photography is that it records so much detail; one of the worst things about photography is that it records so much detail. The question becomes, “Is all of the detail in the frame significant?” and “Are the qualities of the information presented appropriate for the statement being made?” Photographers are obsessed with making sharp images and for good reason, if the main subject is out-of-focus it usually frustrates viewers – with a few notable exceptions. Sharp focus is often mistaken for good technique, when in fact it’s just a technique, sometimes better and sometimes worse. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Too much sharp information may become overstimulating. Overly sharp images grate on nerves, especially if digital sharpening artifacts draw attention to themselves and away from more important aspects of an image. So, it’s equally important to understand when to use blur, how much, what kind but most importantly why.

Here are five key reasons to use blur in images.

Focus Attention

You can make focussed areas seem even more focussed and important bey reducing the focus of other areas, a little or a lot. This is a classic move used frequently by portrait and street photographers when trying to emphasize people and reduce or even eliminate distracting background elements.

Accentuate Space

It’s not only focus but also its relationship to blur that gives us clues to depth-of-field or how deep a space we’re looking at. Increase the difference between the two and space within the frame is enhanced.

Enhance Mood

Texture has inherent aesthetic qualities like sharpness and softness that can greatly enhance an image’s mood. Just ask, how do you want an image to feel physically and emotionally?

Show motion

While photographs are by their nature still, life is constantly in motion, and you may want to record that. While the artifacts cameras produce aren’t the same as our bodies visual experience of motion they provide a range of visual codes that can suggest motion and can even be fascinating visual experiences in and of themselves, at times providing us new windows into the world, whether it’s the subject or the camera that moves.

Create Abstractions

By deemphasizing details you can direct more attention to the foundations of images. Go further and you can produce simplifications that are virtually unrecognizable and become new aesthetic experiences.

Detail is an essential element in every image but there’s a wide range of ways to treat it and reasons to do so. If you’re not sure what you prefer, explore many ways before committing to a solution that feels right to you. As you find that you’re called towards certain treatments ask why and how that’s serving the statements you’re making with your images. You may become more conscious of what you’ve found your way to unconsciously and in so doing discover more about how your style reveals your vision and aspects of yourself. 

Don’t forget to explore your digital options. There’s a wealth of new exposure combinations and digital post-processing techniques that may serve you well. If you find you prefer analog processes and effects, ask yourself why. Your answer may be significant even revealing to you and your audiences. What you choose not to do can be just as revealing as what you do. Just make it intentional.

Read more about Blur.
Learn more in our digital photography and digital printing workshops.

5 Ways To Use Abstraction

Creativity - Composition  Comment
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1 – Simplify

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2 – Clarify A Structure

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3 – Show A Process

 
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4  – Visualize A Concept

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5 – Create A Pattern

To one degree or another, every photograph is abstract. At a minimum, photographs are flat rather than three-dimensional. Some photographs are more graphic than others, and the origins of a few photographs are virtually unrecognizable. Determining to what degree a photograph is abstract, how it is abstract, and why it’s abstract will help you understand more about it and its creator’s intentions; this might be you.
Abstraction can serve many functions: it can direct, structure, inform, and express.
Whether you use it a little or a lot, abstraction is a vehicle that can help you strengthen your stories and clarify your point of view. As every image is abstract to one degree or another, ultimately, the question is not whether you will use abstraction but how you will use abstraction in your images. Exploring abstraction is time will spent.
Read the full article on Craft & Vision.
Learn more in my creativity and digital photography workshops.
 
 

38 Quotes On Abstraction

Creativity - Quotes  Comment
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Here’s a collection of my favorite quotes on abstraction.
“Abstraction forces you to reach the highest level of the basics.” – Alan Soffer
“Abstraction is a mental process we use when trying to discern what is essential or relevant to a problem; it does not require a belief in abstract entities.” – Tom G. Palmer
“Abstract literally means to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract… a realistic or non-objective approach makes no difference. The result is what counts.” – Richard Diebenkorn
“To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter. To abstract in art is to separate certain fundamentals from irrelevant material which surrounds them.” – Ben Shahn
“One of the most striking of abstract art’s appearances is her nakedness, an art stripped bare.” – Robert Motherwell
“It was only since the turn of the century that one returned to the immense role that abstraction plays in the human mind by its power of concentration upon absolute essentials.” – S. Giedion
“I understand abstract art as an attempt to feed imagination with a world built through the basic sensations of the eyes.” – Jean Helion
“Painting, like music, has nothing to do with the reproduction of nature, nor interpretation of intellectual meanings. Whoever is able to feel the beauty of colors and forms has understood non-objective painting.” – Hilla Rebay
“What does that represent? There was never any question in plastic art, in poetry, in music, of representing anything. It is a matter of making something beautiful, moving, or dramatic – this is by no means the same thing.” – Fernand Leger
“An abstract painting is exactly what it purports to be, whether it be paint splatters or stripes, while a representational painting has to give the illusion of the paint being air, or flesh, or flowers… therefore abstract paintings are rather concrete while representational paintings are rather abstract.” – David Leffel
“The abstract painter considers the realist painter to be the abstract painter and himself the realist because he deals realistically with the paint and does not try to transform it into something that it is not.” – Jimmy Leuders
“Abstract art has helped us to experience the emotional power inherent in pure form.” – Anton Ehrenzweig
“I expect of abstraction as much as what imagery does for me… to carry meaning.” – Kay WalkingStick
“The goal of abstract art is to communicate the intangible, that which eludes the photograph and normal seeing.” – Curtis Verdun
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Aaron Siskind – Literally Abstract

My Influences, My Influences - Photographic  Comment
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If he wasn’t the first, Aaron Siskind was certainly the preeminent abstract expressionist photographer. The abstract details he presents as new hyper-flat surfaces stand independent of their original subjects.

Abstraction in non-representational art celebrated in the modernist movement early 20th century has taken many forms; Kandinsky’s expressionism, Picasso’s Cubism, Malevich’s a Constructivism, Stella’s Minimalism, Vasarely’s Op Art, etc) While photography quickly became the gold-standard of realism and consequently it took it longer than painting to embrace abstraction. (It’s arguable that the invention of photography forced painting to embrace abstraction.) Siskind’s images helped establish photography’s credibility as abstract art.

But what kind of abstraction is Siskind’s abstraction? And what is the function of abstraction in Siskind’s work? Coming late to the game his work aggregates many previous sensibilities and ideas.
Like so many modernists he emphasized that what he made was not a representation of something else but “the thing itself” – an idea that has metamorphosed chimera-like since the Greeks and been repurposed by nonrepresentational artists and realists alike. But, while most modernists took pains to avoid including elements that suggest figurative images, Siskind’s images are peppered with them and because of their photographic nature they always reference something else, no matter how covertly. Like Jackson Pollock, Siskind prized directness and immediacy of expression but the personal authenticity derived from this becomes ironic given the essentially appropriative nature of photography. Like Franz Kline, Siskind’s images are riddled with poetic gestures, but none of the gestures in his images are made by hand or by him. Like Wassily Kandinsky, Siskind drew an analogy between his images and musical scores or performances, never mind that he worked without color or purely with tone.

Siskind’s abstraction defies resolution. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Siskind’s abstraction is that so many forms of abstraction and the ideas behind them coalesce into a single arena, the photographic frame.

Siskind’s work fascinated me instantly because in representing so little it demonstrated so much. A literal recording can be supremely abstract. Sometimes a photograph looks nothing like the thing photographed. To photograph is to transform. (And there are many ways to bring about transformation and many kinds of transformations.) A photograph is never the thing it represents and never just a photograph.

Find out more about my influences here.