He had the reputation for judging a photographer by looking at their contact sheets upside down. He would always say you should look at a picture upside down because you can see the construction. You can see the way the photograph is being composed much better than the right way up.
Pete
on 29 Apr 10Reminds me of how my art teacher taught me to draw from upside down images to get the proportions correct. You see things differently when you’re not distracted by recognizing familiar objects such as faces.
steve
on 29 Apr 10similar to how I initially spell-check by reading documents backwards – to focus on individual words – and then go back forwards for contextual spelling (their vs there), grammar, etc
Marcius Fabiani
on 29 Apr 10That’s right, Pete—this is definitely related to the “right side of the brain” approach to drawing.
Markus
on 30 Apr 10Tricks like drawing the space around objects, reading backwards, or watching photographs upside down are made to break the dominance of the “left side of the brain”. The left brain focuses an symbols and logical relations, the right side on shapes and distances. Turning a picture around breaks the common recognition patterns. Instead of faces, landscapes, or letters (left brain things), we see shapes, lines, and compositions (right brain things).
Michael S
on 30 Apr 10Hmm…I might try cropping images upside down to see if that helps composition.
GeeIWonder
on 03 May 10You see things differently when you’re not distracted by recognizing familiar objects such as faces.
This is true. But who’s to say which way is more important?
An objectively ‘true’ representation (in a non-Platonic sense) is banal. Maybe even more so in photography.
El Greco was right.
This discussion is closed.