Photos give a representation of reality. At least many
people think so. But do they really do? Recently I had a photo exhibition in my
town in which I tried to make clear that they don’t. The photos showed
landscapes, city views and the like but all had, what I would call, “natural”
frames. Often photos on an exhibition are put in wooden, plastic or metal frames,
but I had taken the photos that way that the frame was in the photo itself, for example because I had taken a photo
through a window together with the window frame (see for example the photo
above). Of course, you cannot capture the whole world in one picture, so a
photo must have an edge, but what many people don’t realize is that just the
edge makes that the photo doesn’t give an objective view, but that it is
subjective because there is an edge.
The edge directs the contents of the photo and makes that it presents a
perspective on the world and that it is a subjective interpretation of the
world. In other words, the edge of a photo functions like a frame. In order to
stress this and to make the viewers of my photos aware of it, I had the photos on
my exhibition provided with natural frames.
In sociology, a
frame is a set of concepts and theoretical perspective on how we perceive
reality. Framing is the social and perspectival construction of a phenomenon. The
frame tells us what is valuable and it excludes what isn’t, because we don’t
find it interesting; because it distracts; because we want to ignore it; and so
on. Actually in psychology it is the same but the difference is that psychology
concentrates on other themes than sociology does – which just makes that the
sociological and psychological perspectives are also frames! – Prejudices and
testimonies are instances of such frames. Prejudices are ways to order the
world and to pigeon-hole persons and phenomena. And when an accident has
happened and a policeman asks the witnesses what they have seen, he will hear
different stories, for each person interprets what took place from a different point
of view.
Framing can have quite extreme and improbable effects.
Take this psychological experiment:
Imagine you are asked to watch a video in which six
people – three in white shirts and three in black shirts – pass basketballs
around. While you watch, you must keep a silent count of the number of passes
made by the people in white shirts. At some point, a gorilla – actually a man
in a gorilla suit – strolls into the middle of the action, faces the camera and
thumps its chest, and then leaves, spending nine seconds on screen. Would you
see the gorilla? I think you’ll say “yes” but actually half of the test persons
did not: Their frame of attention was counting the passes which made that much
what didn’t fit this frame was excluded from their attention, including the
gorilla facing the camera. (source: http://theinvisiblegorilla.com/gorilla_experiment.html)
To take yet a photographic example: Recently there was
much to do on Facebook about the famous photo of a little Vietnamese girl hurt
by napalm and fleeing from her village that had been bombed with napalm (https://geschotenindeoorlog.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/vietnam-napalm-girl1.jpg).
The photo is very dramatic. However in order to emphasize the drama – and with
right, I think – the photographer had cut off the right part of the photo,
which showed a relaxed soldier looking at the camera in his hands (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bj5h_YaCIAE2Jom.jpg:large).
If the photographer wouldn’t have cropped the picture, it would have been less
dramatic: A matter of framing.
Compared with the photo of the napalm girl, my photos
with natural frames are not dramatic. Their contents is innocent. However, they
show what you can do with a frame, and what we in fact all do every time when
we look at something: Frames stress what we want or expect to see, just as in
my photos the frames emphasize landscapes and their beauty, or the dullness of
a rainy day. But actually we don’t know what happens outside the frames and
where they have been taken.
My photos with natural frames can be viewed here:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/photographybytheway/albums/72157657516004509
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