Principles of visual hierarchy in classical photography

[Alan Klein]

Movement? In still photography? How can this be achieved?

For most images motion blur is considered a defect to be avoided.

Would this work, Dan?

https://www.flickr.com/photos/alankl...57625796644064

[jnantz]

norly

have you read Camera Lucida ( Roland Barthes ) or Photographers on Photography, or the other essays by Susan Sontag yet ?
they might give you more insights about what you are looking for.

[Dan Fromm]

Would this work, Dan?

https://www.flickr.com/photos/alankl...57625796644064

Thanks for asking. The blurs don't draw my, um, eye to them. They don't work for me.

[norly]

norly

have you read Camera Lucida ( Roland Barthes ) or Photographers on Photography, or the other essays by Susan Sontag yet ?
they might give you more insights about what you are looking for.

Thank you. I will have a read and se if there is some good info there to be found.

[jnantz]

Thank you. I will have a read and se if there is some good info there to be found.

one thing you might do is speak with someone who recently got an MFA in photography, film, art/architectural history and ask to see their syllabus,
often times similar philosophical, esoteric and scientific texts are required reading and end up in their final thesis

[Oren Grad]

There's a whole zoo of scholarly books and art-school textbooks that seek to understand and/or teach visual communication in terms of fundamental elements of perceptual psychology. One of the classics is Art and Visual Perception by Rudolf Arnheim:

https://archive.org/details/art-and-...rudolf-arnheim

[Tin Can]

Words fail

Since its publication fifty years ago, this work has established itself as a classic. It casts the visual process in psychological terms and describes the creative way one's eye organizes visual material according to specific psychological premises. In 1974 this book was revised and expanded, and since then it has continued to burnish Rudolf Arnheim's reputation as a groundbreaking theoretician in the fields of art and psychology.
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[Drew Wiley]

Larry Jordan might have his scale of hierarchies; but hierarchies always get overthrown sooner or later. And artists have gotten into heated fights over these things for centuries. There are certain physiological/psychological responses, however, which are generally taught in color theory.

Some colors "advance" like yellow and red; some "recede" from the surface plane, like blue. But what first draws your attention is a matter of proportionality. In black and white photography, black naturally recedes visually. But that doesn't mean black is unable to grab attention first : Look at Brett Weston's shattered window pictures with their bold graphic blacks. Even in a thick carbon transfer print where black sits on top, our brain tries to make it recede.

There is just so much to all of this. Much of my early color work messed with people's heads using complex layering. I wasn't doing it for that reason. I found it beautiful. And it explains why I dislike polarizing filters. I enjoy the sparkle and glare, and overlapping reflections - the constant push/pull of the surface plane.

Many of us have employed movement too. But this doesn't mean the moving portion necessarily grabs the eye first. Again, it's a matter of proportion, along with the other factors in play.
Wynn Bullock did an eloquent series where he wanted the element of time expressed, and some of that involved motion.

[Michael R]

Wynn Bullock did an eloquent series where he wanted the element of time expressed, and some of that involved motion.

Sea Palms!

[LabRat]

There's a whole zoo of scholarly books and art-school textbooks that seek to understand and/or teach visual communication in terms of fundamental elements of perceptual psychology. One of the classics is Art and Visual Perception by Rudolf Arnheim:

https://archive.org/details/art-and-...rudolf-arnheim

I was going to suggest Arnheim, but I figure most will not be able to abstract those principles into their work, unless they learn to strip a subject down to its skeleton form and build on it...

A valuable lesson is to remember that when drawing, one starts with single lines, more lines intersect, rounded lines are drawn over these forms, then textures, until it becomes more and more complex, until chaos creeps in... In photography, we work in reverse spotting complexity/chaos and reduce this to simple forms, but we can stop at minimalism or leave (organized) complexity...

So these art principles are great when starting on a blank sheet and incorporated into the layout, but we are stuck finding these in the visual environment and allowing them to lay as a foundation form... Not easy, but one leans to find and see...

Too many artists tend to see the whole of an object, textures, scenes, objects of interest etc as a subject, but it's form first... (A friend of mine who taught drawing/painting noticed most students saw the surface details of a subject, and much less of the structural forms, like if they tried to draw a stuffed animal horse, many would start drawing the plush fuzz, not forms)...

Steve K