Form and Color in Photography; Discover the captivating world of photography through the interplay of form and color. Explore how photographers use shapes, lines, and hues to create stunning visual compositions.
Introduction
Photography is regarded as the most important invention of the 19th century, it is said and very rightly said that photography is the most important invention on earth after the writing.
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Photography has become an essential part of human life, today every moment we live photography, in every sphere of human life photography plays an important role. Whether it is some family function, social gathering, important event, entertainment, educational or research activity, media, or anything else, photography is everywhere.
Photography is Generally Practiced in Two Ways:
1. Firstly, a majority of people use it as a medium of documentation and, secondly, though by not very many, as a discipline of fine art. When used as a medium of documentation, it captures authentic reality.
2. Secondly a medium to express your creative expression, in the realm of fine art, it is symbolic of one’s creative expression, where creativity replaces reality and the result becomes a work of art.
Though technology is very much involved in creating a photographic image, in the final analysis, it is neither the technology nor the camera that creates an image but the man behind the camera.
Know How to Mix Paints
Yes, anyone can operate a camera and produce a snap, but few very few can make a photograph with enduring structure and meaning. It is rightly said by Yusuf Karsh the great portrait photographer, that “Merely to know how to mix paints would not have produced works of Michelangelo, Rembrandt or Rubins, nor does an understanding of technicalities of photography and knowledge to handle the camera, make a good photograph or a photographer. There will always be good and bad photographers just as there are good and bad painters and sculptures or printmakers, but it is quite convincing that photography when given freedom of expression in the hands of an imaginative mind can produce a work of art.
Prints and Visual Communication
William Irvins, the late curator of prints and photography at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, called the invention of photography the most important revolution since the invention of writing. Irvins in his book ‘Prints and Visual Communication” further said that the real issue is not whether photography is an art but whether art is now simply a variant of photography. Some of the most exquisite nineteenth-century photographs were made by painters and Joseph Nicephore Niepce, Jacquis Monde Duguerre and William Fox Talbot, the inventors of the photographic process were painters.
Photography as a Medium of Fine Arts
In the early days photography might have been used as a medium of recording people, places, or events but now it has become a very powerful medium of fine art. One can use photography to record things with extraordinary clarity, realism, and richness of details or you may choose to interpret the world around you in highly personal and creative terms. Today photography acts less and less as a medium of information but more and more as a
medium of expression and creativity. Today photography is the most democratic of art and is the most aristocratic. Today photography has become the most popular medium of creative expression. Arts come from the heart not from the camera, canvas paint, etc.
Photography is the Art of Observation
Elliott Erwin once said, “Photography is an art of observation. It has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them. Great events don’t always make great photographs. Events invariably are associated with people, in certain situations, in certain settings. Photographs of people in such settings, more often than not, serve only as a memory of the event. Therein lies the most popular use of the photograph as a reminder of the absence. Just the way a photograph may be of people or events, it might
well easily be of places, or simply enough things. Such a photograph could also be a great photograph. So, to take a photograph, and a good one at that, one can snap almost anything under the sun, even the most banal.
Visual Importance
Just try to choose the placid, casual, detached, undramatic, and underplayed. In a way, the visual import of the photograph could be the result of a canny perception which enables one to eliminate the decidedly sentimental and over-cluttered picture frame. Stress should be on simplicity and simplicity of the subject matter. Simplicity, even to the trained eye could be a misnomer.
In the hands of a sensitive photographer, the mundane and trivial can be an abject of beauty. It becomes necessary to reiterate how commonplace and obscure themes may be photographed with enough dynamism to render the object out of its immediate context, to telescope it into another framework altogether. A shift, or dimensional change, of course, implies a different way of looking at things.
Work of Marvel
The interesting point is, how mundane and trivial can be an abject of beauty and why give emphasis and stress on simplicity. I have personally experienced, experimenting on these lines may end up with the work of Marvel. One needs courage and will to work in new and different directions to create something, that is not stale but has the fragrance of freshness. Perhaps it requires firm objectivity, frankness, and approach. The tendency to
believe that tradition is an inescapable element has to go, tradition should not be the only yardstick.
Emotional Expression of Reality
It is high time fresh talent burst forth the seams of prejudice and jingoism. We should learn to shed out tendencies governed by a neurosis that finds its roots in antiquity. Basically, in trigging off one’s appeal, one is, in a broad capacity, coming to the term ‘the new’. One should make a choice, a deliberate one at that, thus enhancing the sensitivity of the approach. The criterion is of value, what one accepts and what one rejects. Edward Steichen has very rightly said, “The camera is a vehicle for emotional expression of reality and dynamic power for giving form to ideas”
When such images are transported through the medium of the viewfinder, the original subject/object is displaced; a metamorphosis takes place to create a new identity. To accept an image is to record it purely in the context of other images being rejected in place of the better.
Render the Object out of its Immediate Context
At this stage it becomes necessary to reiterate how commonplace and obscure themes may be photographed with enough dynamism to render the object out of its immediate context, to telescope it into another framework altogether. A shift, or dimensional change, of course, implies a different way of looking at things. For me what is important is that the visual impact of inanimate detail can be as emotionally moving as the subliminal effect of a personal experience.
The criterion is of value, what a photographer accepts or rejects. Of course, this is antithetical to Clement Greenburg’s opinion: “The art of photography is literary art before it is anything else; its triumphs and monuments are historical, anecdotal, observational before they are purely pictorial ….. The photograph has to tell a story if it is to work as an art.” Not necessarily, it does not have to – at least for me.
Experiment with Form and Color
What Greenburg means to say is that a photograph lacking story-telling content is redundant. Well, it only stands to reason that photograph before anything else in an image on celluloid or digital form. Images are visual and they will remain. It is only after that, that a photograph becomes literary or historical. After doing landscape photography for quite a long, for the last ten years, I have been experimenting with ‘Form and color’. In this world “form and color” are important aspects and attributes for everything whether living or non-living. In nature, we find numerous forms and colors, and these forms and colors give the concept of beauty and a sense of aesthetics and stimulate the human mind.
For this experimentation, the images are isolated, visualized, conceived, and thus created by me mostly from ordinary-looking concrete structures, to show the inner vision through the pictures which create something unusual, and that unusual comes to life from looking at these ordinary structures through the camera viewfinder, things transform to unbelievable pictures. The basic idea behind experimentation is to create something unusual from most usual and ordinary-looking things.
Balance and Symmetry and Form
I feel there are splendid lines and energy and space which are brilliantly crafting balance between stability and movement and it inspires me to use them with the sense of aesthetic possibilities. Visualizing Form and Colour scattered around us, from a different perspective, my work deals with patterns and colors and their relationships derived from classical ideals of balance and Symmetry and Form. Mathematical yet organic, these abstract colored forms invite the viewer to partake of the geometric aesthetic.
These classic forms are pushed in new directions, so viewers can take pleasure in their Platonic beauty yet recognize how they are updated for our complex high-tech times. I wish to share the idea that Form and Colour may be a worthy object. This is just a humble experiment to explore the nature of the geometric form and color and their possible relation in photography as an art form.
