When we walk out
with our camera and select a part of the world to make an image from
we are choosing detail. This bit seems to say what we are visualizing
better than that over there, and our viewfinder zeros in for the
snap. This might be a snapshot with our smart phone, unplanned and
quickly chosen, or a carefully set up studio shot, or a landscape
chosen for its specific lighting and point of view. In a way we are
being hunter gatherers at this point, selecting and harvesting, and
that ultimately might be the attraction of photography. Think about
photo-safaris.
The confusion about
detail is if we think of our viewfinder as the 'frame'. At the moment
of capture, as we press the shutter, it is simply a gun-sight, and we
then drag our game home to the fireside. Once within the computer our
digital image is like the story of the hunt: within the limits of the
information/details captured we can choose how we tell the story, how
we organize as we crop and otherwise adjust our image. Everything
within the edges of the frame is in relationship, so the
detailed visual information we find there is all contained within the
original capture. The snow bank that fills the screen with its soft
gradations of tone is set off, defined, by a thin triangle that shows
the top of the snow and an orchard tree in the distance: That is
there to define form, its job is simply to animate that other detail,
the snow.
I peer down from
the wharf and see green water and a single red leaf and take a
photograph. The detail encompasses the whole shallows , the supports
of the dock and that leaf off in one corner. Later, within the final
frame, the green interacts with that one spot of red, but the leaf is
not the 'detail' but a part of the final image that expresses that
red/green relationship.
I seem to be
splitting hairs, defining detail so narrowly, detail being a selected
part of reality and frame being about relationship, and we know that
in reality we take a photograph with detail and frame and shutter
speed and camera angle and aperture all present as we press the
shutter. So, this is a way of understanding that in photography, as
opposed to other visual arts, we work with what is before us, the
things of this world, and that we need to select carefully if we are
to express accurately. The detail we hunt for or dig from the
productive soil of our imagination is all important.