The Assignment for the week of 6 – 12 October is “The Essence.” Let me say up front that this will probably be one of our more conceptually difficult assignments; however, if you follow it through, I think what you learn will help you become a much better photographer, artist, and communicator.
In past assignments we’ve talked about isolating your subject and simplifying your compositions in order to guide your viewer’s attention and clarify your message. This method of concentrating on your subject typically leads to images where your primary subject fills the frame. While this can result in very powerful images, it doesn’t quite get to the point that I’m trying to make in the “essence” assignment.
In “the essence” assignment, I’m trying to get you to see that there are certain unique characteristics that “define” an object for the viewer. If you have ever attempted a line drawing of animals, you’ve come to realize that certain key elements in the drawing will allow viewers to instantly recognize the object of the drawing. For a line drawing of a horse, the “key element” is often the jaw line of the horse. Since the jaw line of a horse is distinct from the jaw line of other domestic animals, your line drawing can be “less accurate” in replicating other features of the horse, and your viewer will still recognize the animal as a horse. In the same way, the vertical slits in the pupils of a cat’s eye will instantly define the animal as a cat, since this feature is unique to cats. Your image (a drawing in this case) will be successful as long as you adequately convey this “key characteristic” of your subject. Understanding the power of these “key characteristics” and applying them to your photography will enable you to produce much more powerful images.
In “the essence” assignment, I want you to identify a “key characteristic” of a subject, and isolate your composition to this “key characteristic” to convey a sense of the subject. While it might seem like what I’m asking for is an “abstract” image, that is not quite the case. I’m not asking you to record a portion of an object and then have your viewer “guess” at what the object is. I’m asking you to record a portion of the object in such a way that your viewer will instantly recognize the subject. Conceptually, this assignment is a follow-on to our “seeing simple beauty” assignment, which emphasized “seeing” ordinary objects, and our “texture” assignment, which emphasized “seeing” and recording textures to convey a tactile sense of an object. In the “essence” assignment, you should recognize that there are other “key characteristics” similar to texture that can be just as powerful at conveying a sense of a particular object.
As usual, if you have any questions on the assignment, please don’t hesitate to ask. Please upload your images to the “The Essence” album in the Weekly Assignments category of the gallery no later than midnight, Mountain Time (GMT – 07:00) on Sunday, 12 October 2008. Have fun!
