Joe's How-To

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?

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

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 Valley. 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.

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.

Fig. 1

On one February evening, in a snowy field near Curry Camp, at the edge of an intermittent stream, I took a picture. That’s my Half Dome shot. It is clear what the subject is by its placement in the frame, which draws the eye upward, and is supported by leading lines and the reflection in the water.

That’s a fairly straightforward composition. I’ve used it dozens of times on other simple subjects, like a sunrise or a brilliant aspen tree or even a portrait. There is no doubt where I placed the subject within the frame. But not all scenes lend themselves to a single subject like this one. There may be no specific object in the frame that you want the viewer to see. Instead you want the viewer to see the process that created the scene.

Complex Subject

A photograph in which the subject is the process falls into the complex category. There are many different processes – erosion, combustion, oxidation, etc. – that create interesting and photogenic landscapes. For these photographs the challenge is not placing the subject in a particular place within the frame, it is arranging all of the objects so that the subject is unmistakable. For example, if a forest is on fire you show trees on fire; the dynamic nature and color of the flames is the subject. If a forest has been burned, though, the subject is the aftermath of the process.

Capturing the aftermath of a process is tricky (for me, at least). I’ve made photographs of details like burned bark and rusted metal, but unlike Half Dome (which stands by itself) these single subjects aren’t enough to hold attention. Their placement within a frame doesn’t by itself make the picture any better. Photographing a process requires more design, more storytelling, more sensitivity to color and light. It’s more complicated, but it can also be liberating. Fig. 2 - “After the Wolsey Fire”

It’s difficult to make sense of a scarred landscape. Looking at the bank of a creek in Malibu Creek State Park after the Woolsey Fire I saw chaos. It reminded me of photographs from World War I, where artillery and flames twisted the trees and scorched the fields. Although there were no people in those images, their suffering was palpable. That’s what I tried to capture (Figure 2).

I made some decisions here. The first was to orient the scene around the tree in the center, which leans in the opposite direction from the rest and creates tension in the image. The second was to stand at a distance from the scene, in order to flatten the perspective. The third was to move around (a lot) to get separation between the burned snags in order to isolate each figure. The fourth was the choice of palette, which adds to the unsettling feeling of it all. The result is not a photograph of burntout snags or charred earth. Those things are within the frame, but they aren’t the subject. It’s a photograph of victims of devastation pleading for help.

Inferred Subject

The third type of subject is an inferred one. You cannot see it, but you can figure out what it is by the attitudes and positions of other objects in the photograph. It is two people making eye contact and leaning towards each other, or one person leaning towards another who expresses indifference. The link between them is the subject. There are three ways we can characterize the link, which can exist alone or in combination. These are the strength of the link, the content of the link, and the direction of the link. The strength of the link can be signaled by the distance between the objects relative to the entire image. If we see two trees standing together and alone in a field we can infer that they are more strongly linked than two isolated trees at opposite ends of the field. The content of the link can be inferred by the similarity of the trees. Two aspens at a distance will have more in common than an aspen and a lodgepole pine in close proximity. Finally, the direction of the link can be inferred by how the objects relate to each other. It can be one-way or multi-directional, or even linked together in a cascade.

We can use these in combination to tell a story about the relationships between objects. A murmuration of blackbirds is an extraordinary thing to witness because of the invisible links among the birds. With every turn of the flock we can see the strength, content, and direction of whatever it is that connects them. We can also see links at a distance. Two identical plants separated by a canyon illustrate the links within the ecosystem without being able to see them directly.

I’ve asked Velda to use two of her photographs to illustrate the concept. These are the same two ranunculus in each photo, on the same tabletop. One is a beauty shot of two simple subjects. It looks like they are sharing a stage but are not linked together. In the second photograph Velda created a link by roIt’s very common that I’ll arrive at a location and look around and say, “What am I shooting here?” In the absence of a simple subject, like Half Dome or El Capitan, I start looking around for something else. That something else isn’t always obvious, and may not be something that occurs to me immediately. It’s only by spending time with it, by trying to understand the processes that created the scene or the relationships within the scene, that I can begin to photograph the subject.

tating the vase and changing the attitude and position of the stems and heads. The flower on the right is leaning in, its bloom facing the one on the left, but at a respectful distance. The flower on the left has turned its head away, indifferent. If you cover either of these flowers in the second frame, you would have a nice shot of a flower. Together, they can tell a story about what’s between them.

www.joedohertyphotography.com

Uninvolved

Involved

26