Joe’s How-To
ley. My 1978 shot was an unmitigated bore. I placed the icon dead center in the top half of a horizontal frame at noon on a cloudless day in May: no leading lines, no balance, no tension, no color, no contrast. I didn’t shoot Half Dome again for more than thirty years.
What is the Subject? By Joe Doherty
On a recent podcast the host asked his guest where she places the subject of the photograph within her frame. That got me thinking about that word -- subject. What is the subject in my photographs?
Thirty years is how long it took me to think I might have something to say about Half Dome. I wanted to make a photo in which the emotional impact of the icon would be amplified by the decisions I made. It didn’t need to be great, but it needed to be mine. And it needed to be about Half Dome.
I spent years as an academic thinking about this question, but we didn’t use the word “subject.” We called it the “dependent variable.” A big part of our work was defining it, not just to say what it is but also what it isn’t. We’d start simple, and then build up to something more complicated. And if we got lucky, the subject had legs and became more interesting the longer we looked at it. I find the same is true in photography. Simple subjects are the beginning, often something that’s been photographed before. Then we mix things up, by changing the exposure or the time of day or the season, or we choose different but similar subjects. And then we complicate our photography in other ways. Sometimes these complications pay off. So when the podcast host asked where his guest placed her subject, I thought about my own work. Do all of my photos have a subject? What does it mean if my photo has a whole lot of objects in the frame, but none of them are the subject? In breaking down my own work over time, I think I can distill the subject into three categories: simple, complex, and inferred. Simple Subject
Fig. 1
So let’s start simple. I first photographed Half Dome in 1978. It is one of the most iconic subjects in all of landscape photography. It’s easy to define as the big granite monolith that dominates the eastern end of Yosemite Val22
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