Formalism

describes the position that is the most important aspect of a work of art in its natural form, the way it is made and its purely visual aspects rather than its narrative content or its relationship to the visible world and what we can see. For example, formalists within mathematics claim that mathematics is no more than the symbols written down by the mathematician on a piece of paper, which is based on logic and a few elementary rules alone.

Photographers have to impose order, bring structure to what they photograph. A photograph without structure is useless.

  Formal and visual elements (such as line, shape, repetition, rhythm, balance etc.) are shared with other works of art. But photographs also have a specific grammar , such as flatness, frame, time, focus etc.

There are seven basic elements to photographic art that we must explore over the coming weeks:

1. Line
2. Shape
3. Form
4. Texture
5. Color
6. Size
7. Depth

Darren Harvey-Regan, Walker Evans –

Beauties of the common tool – 1955 photographs. This shows the softness and rough shapes to this photo. The tool seems to be quiet big because of the position and angel the camera was placed and how the photo was taken. The tone of this picture is quiet dark and there is a lot of back round space. The photo is in focus and has a cool temperature to it. This photograph could have a deeper meaning such as loneliness or fear as its quiet a dull photograph with a broken tool which could symbolise pain too.,  both artists paid careful attention to choice of objects, composition, lighting and exposure values.

Line in photography is the use of lines to create visual interest and convey a message in an image. Lines can be used to direct the viewer’s attention, create a sense of depth and can even be used to create a sense of movement.

Shape photography is the two-dimensional appearance of objects as your camera captures them. For instance, if you look at an image of a ball, you’ll find its shape as a circle. Likewise, if you look at a picture of a cube-shaped suitcase, you’ll find its shape like a square.

Form refers to when shape takes on three dimensions. Form is created by shadows and highlights on an object in the photograph. You can see in these two photos how shape becomes form when light hits the subject.

When talking about photography texture refers to the visual quality of the surface of an object, revealed through variances in shape, tone and color depth. Texture brings life and vibrance to images that would otherwise appear flat and uninspiring.

Red can mean danger, blue symbolizes calm, yellow is happy, black is mournful, white is innocent, and purple can symbolize wealth. Here, we will briefly discuss types of color in photographs. If you want to dive deeper into color theory, please enjoy Cory Rice’s fantastic article here.

The Basics:

Image Size is the term given to describe the height and width of an image in pixels. Maximum Image Size is determined by the megapixels of a given camera – for example, a 10-megapixel camera will give a maximum image size of 2592 by 3872 pixels.

In simplest terms, depth of field is how much of your image is in focus. In more technical terms, depth of field is the distance in an image where objects appear “acceptably in focus” or have a level of “acceptable sharpness

Steiglitz and Strand, “often abstracted reality by eliminating social or spatial context; by using viewpoints that flattened pictorial space, acknowledging the flatness of the picture plane; and by emphasising shape and tonal rendition in highlights and shadows as much as in the actual subject matter.”