June’s post led to a discussion of vertical lines. Three pictures are shown here that show not only vertical lines but also put them either at the center of a picture or where they frame a path in the center of the picture:
(1) In the 19th century, Pierre Etienne Theodore Rousseau put a road lined by trees pretty much into the center of his painting ‘Village of Becquigny”.
Last week, Dave Caldwell published a picture of the Appalachian Trail in the NYT with a similar composition.
A photo by Seth Kugel, also last week in the NYT, makes the same point, vertical lines pretty much at the center of the scene!
Has Rousseau’s point of view – centered vertical lines – caught on 2 centuries later? What has happened to the convention of putting objects of interest discreetly at some ‘third’ aspect of the picture?
Birgit,
What wonderful examples of the skews images can take, whether painted or photographed. I was, of course, instantly fascinated with the curving of space in your examples.
But the question of centered verticals is also interesting, because, I think, the notion of the “sweet spot” at an 2/3 place on the image has been turned into a cliche. This is what happened to the centering that we see all through the Renaissance and later — it becomes a cliche, a bit trite and oft used as a “rule” and so some maverick decides that images with centered vertical lines are foolish. And we find another sweet spot.
What fascinates me about the centered images is the dropping off of the sides (in the Kubel photo) as well as the converging of the trees in the Caldwell photo. So while we may have moved back toward a Rousseau aesthetic, it has been changed by people like Hockney and Downes and photography in general.
June,
The curvatures are compelling! Reading your recent post makes me hesitate to flatten the horizon on my photos using the filter-distort-lens-correction option in AP.
It is fun the way that the trees lean towards potential hikers on Caldwell’s path, and the way the sides fall off the bar in the Kubel picture, giving us a ‘Star Wars’ like feeling.
I suppose this is my Philistinism coming to the fore, but I find the symmetry in these pieces restful and, because of that, engaging.
I love central vertical lines.
(Yes, it snowed here yesterday.)