He had the reputation for judging a photographer by looking at their contact sheets upside down. He would always say you should look at a picture upside down because you can see the construction. You can see the way the photograph is being composed much better than the right way up.
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Quoted by Matt Linderman on April 29 2010. There are 6 comments.
Pete 29 Apr 10
Reminds me of how my art teacher taught me to draw from upside down images to get the proportions correct. You see things differently when you’re not distracted by recognizing familiar objects such as faces.
steve 29 Apr 10
similar to how I initially spell-check by reading documents backwards – to focus on individual words – and then go back forwards for contextual spelling (their vs there), grammar, etc
Marcius Fabiani 29 Apr 10
That’s right, Pete—this is definitely related to the “right side of the brain” approach to drawing.
Markus 30 Apr 10
Tricks like drawing the space around objects, reading backwards, or watching photographs upside down are made to break the dominance of the “left side of the brain”. The left brain focuses an symbols and logical relations, the right side on shapes and distances. Turning a picture around breaks the common recognition patterns. Instead of faces, landscapes, or letters (left brain things), we see shapes, lines, and compositions (right brain things).
Michael S 30 Apr 10
Hmm…I might try cropping images upside down to see if that helps composition.
GeeIWonder 03 May 10
You see things differently when you’re not distracted by recognizing familiar objects such as faces.
This is true. But who’s to say which way is more important?
An objectively ‘true’ representation (in a non-Platonic sense) is banal. Maybe even more so in photography.
El Greco was right.
This discussion is closed.