A non-rectangular crop

Whilst Krauss does not explicitly state that the crop in photography must be a particular shape for it to be non-coded, the rectangular shape of a cropped image is an implicit given when thinking about the photograph (or the painting, or the screen or, in fact any other of the many rectangular-shaped, visual-cultural forms). Krauss does not consider (or at least she does not feel it necessary to discuss) the rectangular shape of a photograph’s crop. But can the shape of a crop potentially jeopardise the ‘non-coded’ status of the photograph?

Lindsay Seers uses regular rectangular photographic paper to make her photographs, but the image itself is not rectangular, it is cropped to a circle or the outline of her mouth (the aperture in her ‘Human Camera’).16

The rectangle is the standard shape we have become used to when we apprehend an image, so when a photograph like Seers’ appears - one that exists in another shape - our intuitive response is, perhaps, to assume a conscious interference with the ‘default’ of the rectangular. Such an interference, being chosen by the photographer, would then be an ‘internal adjustment’, a syntactical manipulation, destroying the photograph’s status as an index. But Seer’s process does not feel like a syntactically loaded interference. In fact, Seer’s photographic process is even less coded, and even more direct than that of standard flm-based photography.

In the frst place, a circular crop refects a shape that is truer to the process. Light passing through any camera creates a naturally circular image, but in standard flm cameras this image is cropped down to its central rectangular section17 - in Seers’ photograph a circular crop is used (or merely the naturally occurring crop determined by the irregular outline of her mouth aperture).

Secondly, there is no double transfer in Seer’s pinhole like technique - her body is more a camera obscura than a standard flm-camera (where the image requires a second stage of processing - from flm to paper - to make it manifest). The light moves through Seer’s mouth shutter directly onto the photosensitive paper to make its image.

When we remember that the rectangular shape of a standard photographic image is not in fact a ‘point by point’18 correspondence with the natural world (it is not part of the logic of nature) - but instead determined by the design of the camera and flm, we can look at the non-rectangular diferently. We can see that images such as Seers’ - made directly onto their fnal substrate, cropped into a circle that retains the natural logic of light moving through an aperture - are, in fact, more compliant with the criteria of the index than the standard rectangular photographic crop.