Less is More: Minimalism in New Media Photography

6 min readNov 29, 2016

She walked into my room, let out a big sigh, and fell on to my bed, staring at the ceiling — “Your room! It’s so wonderful in here, it makes me want to write, I could stay in a place like this and write all day long.” My friend Sarah was in town from Pittsburg coming back to Athens for a long weekend, taking a break from her recently obtained job as a young journalist for a national paper. I had just put the finishing touches on my redecorated my room and she was one of the first people to walk in and see it. The design scheme for my room is the same I wanted to study in photos: completely minimal.

Sarah’s exuberance for being in such a tranquil place got me thinking what specifically about minimalism that causes humanity, especially artists, to identify with beauty. Sarah has completely different taste than I do: she wears brightly colored southern wear most of the time, she spends four nights of her week inside a dug out covered in dirt sending live tweets about the Pittsburg Pirates, and probably thinks about the aesthetic environment of her home once or twice a month. But the first twenty seconds Sarah spent in our minimal environment of a house got me thinking about the influence of this style on our every day lives, what about it calls us forward, and why I cannot scroll through my Instagram feed without finding the work of my favorite photographers that is styled minimal.

Sarah does not take photos like myself, but she does create, and I began an endeavor of asking why this specific style gave her a desire to do so.

Images from “Seeing Double” series by Neil Bedford, using minimalistic style to emphasize the slight and subtlest differences between identical twins

Minimalism is an artform seen throughout history dating back to the Bauhaus movement in early 20th century Germany. Following the Victorian era and Arts & Crafts movement, this design school set out to question how to keep design simple yet attractive and still produce functional products. They believed it didn’t have to be fancy or elaborate to look nice and work.

After Bauhaus was shut down by Nazi Germany for critique of its “socialist ideals,” the art movement grandfathered Minimalism into the United States in the 1960s when painters and artists started utilizing simplistic methods into their artforms. Since then, most people who follow photography trends of any kind would tell you in the past five years, it has become one of the most dominant styles of photography in our present age.

Along with photography, minimalism is seen in new media technology and other design used to express that. Popular simplified artforms all agree in the same voice that less is more. It’s a successful trend in graphic design, like popular Instagram designer Sam Larson’s work shows. Or in web design, ask any developer what some of the most common requests are they receive from clients and they’ll usually include the words “just something simple” when quoting the requests of small business owners. Or in the app world, the user interface is being simplified to put the tools of what used to be extremely complex editing processes in the hands of amateurs (think VSCOcam compared to Photoshop as an example).

In the world of “new media,” the top relevant trends of technology themselves reflect a minimalist ideology: fewer moving parts, faster performance, and leaner hardware as a whole. The epidemic of this foundation towards progressive technology is in sync with the “less-ness” of appearance and function. Less buttons, less density, less noise, less complicated controls.

Scandinavian minimally designed dishware, as seen in Kinfolk

Reference the technology god’s themselves, just spend 40 seconds clicking around on Apple’s website observing their design. Remember your first mobile device, then your first smartphone, and the most recent iPhone. Drastically slimmer, lighter, and housing only 4 buttons. In Scandinavia, minimalism is the predominant style of expression in almost all interior and exterior design forms alike, even in dishware, handmade goods, and gadget design.

Minimalism takes the adage “less is more” and completely inflames the concept. By taking the perspective of an artist in the 21st century into consideration, we begin to make sense of its wildfire spread. Minimalism provides us, as the creators, with focus, and audiences with an experience that is directs them to significance. Minimalism minimizes. It takes away the clutter, noise, and busyness to bring forth the most harmonious element: a simplicity in stark contrast to our otherwise overcrowded, totally chaotic lives. For fresh and lively minds looking for progression, the bleakness of this artform is exactly what is need to redact confusion and provide clarity of mind for emphasizing photography subjects, or actual innovation.

Though it is a style of more simplicity, it does not necessarily mean for photographers less complexity. Many would say achieving this sleek style can actually be more difficult than photographing something in all of its parts. Minimalism photographer Steve Johnson best summarizes this style of photography like this:

“Minimalist photography is not simply about taking a photograph of less. Minimalism is about getting to the essence of something. By definition, it is a reductive process — a process that starts from a non-minimalist position then, through the stripping away of what is not important, gets to what is important…. [it’s] photography in an easy to digest and extremely helpful manner.”

For the purposes of focus by redacting all distraction, minimalism best suits photographic styles seeking to bring the viewer’s attention to texture, shape, messaging, patterns, details, or subtle visual cues that might otherwise be overlooked. While many have varying opinions on the set of “rules” or components that designate a photograph as minimal, common elements used to achieve it are excessive negative space, intense contrast, and limited content. It’s commonly seen with photographers who favor cooler colors and blue hues, possibly due to its heavy influence from Scandinavian countries with arctic landscapes.

Although we can’t all agree on the rules, we are moving towards a time and space where minimalism will continue to build by lessening, and grow by shedding — the noise, the clutter, the chaos– minimally, of course.