HOW TO BRING YOUR PHOTOS TO A WHOLE NEW LEVEL

Have you ever wondered why some photos ‘click’ for you while others remain insipid? Why some gorgeous photographs stay in your head no longer than your short memory span, while others enter your heart and trigger your emotions? Well there is a perfectly explicable reason for that.

What distinguishes a mildly interesting photo from the piercingly extraordinary? Is there a recipe of a photo appreciated by everyone? Is this even possible? It turns out that even such subjective notion as sympathy can be to some extent explained by theoretical knowledge.

The inspiration for today’s post serves my long beloved photograph of French humanist photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson: Michel Gabriel, Rue Mouffetard (1952). Cartier-Bresson, considered the master of candid photography and dubbed the father of modern photojournalism, has certainly achieved an inégalée quality in his works. His photos spark that seemingly ‘undefinable something’ that grabs everyone’s attention.

A great aid to explain the science behind an amazing photo is Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida , published in 1980. Let’s take a closer look at the theory of studium and punctum, along with 3 rules that will make your photos outstanding!

1. THE MYSTERY

Studium derives from Latin “study”. It is a cultural, linguistic, and political interpretation of a photograph i.e. the WHERE, the WHEN and the WHAT. Barthes tells us:

It is by studium that I am interested in so many photographs, whether I receive them as political testimony or enjoy them as good historical scenes: for it is culturally that I participate in the figures, the faces, the gestures, the setting, the actions.

The studium of Rue Mouffetard is what we see directly, i.e. Michel Gabriel, a boy, holding magnums in his arms, his face exuding a mixture of happiness and confidence. The photograph is not captured in a direct approach, but rather from a top-down angle, that makes us observe it from the perspective of an adult.

For a bigger picture we draw political suggestions from the name and the date of the photograph. We imagine France in the year 1952. The street of a working class district corroborating the unstable years. Is a wine even affordable for a child like him?

Maybe there’s even no wine at all in the bottles. Only water. Or they’re empty.

Is he carrying them home?

Is he carrying them for fun?

Could not he have a better ‘toy’ to show off — pretend that he is rich and adult?

These are only our suggestions, however. We don’t know if there was wine in those magnums, and who, after all, he is smiling to. We may study the blurred figures in the background or even a dressing style of the people. It will still remain an infinite mystery. Thus, the rule number 1 — YOUR STUDIUM HAS TO INCLUDE MYSTERY.

2. THE CONFLICT

There are numerous obvious elements of aesthetic interpretation — the composition, the texture, the light, etc. Yet our souls are longing to unravel a deeper dimension. Punctum is an answer.

It derives from Latin puncture (that which “shoots out of the image like an arrow”).

The punctum could be defined as a rare detail, “that accident which pricks, bruises me” (Barthes 1993), something that marks a photograph with higher value, makes it compelling and powerful to the viewer.

In this photo punctum is a disturbance. It subconsciously makes us feel uneasy about this picture and keeps us attached to the image in attempt to solve this question. We do not even understand what is the key.

The reason of this confusion is violation of our cultural convictions. In our European minds the bottle of wine corresponds to alcohol, which in turn corresponds to adolescence, drunkenness, and, largely, licentiousness. The boy, in turn, connotates with a child, innocence and purity.

The reason of the confusion about the image is usually a violation of our cultural convictions.

The main subliminal confusion starts when we notice a pleased smile on the boy’s face. The smile as a facial expression definitely means something positive. While our moral convictions allow the “boy” and a “smile”, or a “smile” and “bottles of wine”, they cannot put together the “boy” and “bottles of wine” and a “smile”. At very least our brain can combine the “boy” and the “bottles of wine”, but it does not permit a wastly positive expression on his face.

Majority of us have rational sense of humour and would find the photo rather entertaining than disturbing. However, unconsciously, the smile signals about disorder and this is the reason why Rue Mouffetard is so captivating. Therefore — the rule number 2 —THE UNOBVIOUS CONFLICT IN YOUR PHOTO. MAKE IT YOUR PUNCTUM.

3. THE DECISIVE MOMENT

Henri Cartier-Bresson is known for trying to shoot any scene at the moment of it achieving the highest emotional stress, connected with a sense of its visual form, which he called the “decisive moment”, a well-known expression in the photographic world.

The Michel Gabriel, Rue Mouffetard is remarkable for its evident presence of decisive moment in the boy’s facial expression and body language. We see him proudly raising his chin up, smiling the widest possible smile, arching his shoulders back and holding eyebrows high in an audacious manner. It seems the very next second he will burst in laugh and leave a completely different emotional imprint in the picture. Likewise, only a second before the boy probably did not even take this posture yet.

Cartier-Bresson famously stated that

“It [photography] is a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one’s own originality. It is a way of life”.

A ‘shouting’ - a ‘decisive moment’ is captured in a natural setting by letting emotions flow freely and organically. This is a complete opposite to what photographers did in late 1930’s - they would take numerous photos of the same person until they had captured the correct expression that conveyed their interpretation.

“In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects”(Sontag 1979).

The rule number 3 — CAPTURE A DECISIVE MOMENT. Yet don’t make it staged- the great art of taking a worthy photograph is to take it at the right time at the right place.

In the age when “photography has become almost as widely practiced as sex’ and ‘is not practiced by most people as an art” (Sontag, 1979), the art of photography became somewhat abused, defeating a flood of photographs taken by complete amateurs and distributed via various social networks. The majority of them have no meanings and no artistic value. They exist only for someone to take a glimpse and to be forgotten instantly.

Nevertheless, there are always going to be individuals willing to depict a deeper meaning of the photo. Remember: INCLUDE A MYSTERY, AN UNOBVIOUS CONFLICT and CAPTURE A DECISIVE MOMENT. Now the tools are in your hands.