Musing,

 

© Emmet Gowin

Why aren’t there more circular images out there?  This is an idea I’ve been considering for a long time but am finally starting to get fed up with.  The fact that I cannot create documents in Photoshop (or really any program that I know) that aren't rectangular bothers me immensely.  And I don't mean fisheye lenses or sneaky editing maneuvers; I mean a straight, more traditional angle photograph with traditional (or contemporary, whatever you'd like to let it exist as) associations in a non-traditional geometric format.  Why can’t photographs exist outside of the box they live in now?  No matter what we can’t escape it, cameras capture photographs the way we originally made them to, in the shape of a sheet of paper.  We’ve tried to get around it by cropping out the edges, only allowing the viewer to see parts of an image, but viewers are never fooled.  They’ve been trained to understand the format of a photograph, the reality of the rectangle.  They see our attempts as false.  Why aren’t there any circular films, either?  Why can’t we exist organically instead of within this man-made box?

I’ve found few examples of circular photographs, coming from creationists (not in the fundamental sense) such as the AES group’s heavily manipulated Last Riot series and pinhole photographers like Thomas Hudson Reeve and the random unknowns like Dipploid, who we view as experimentalists.  The origins of photography hold a few circular photographers, but it seems that idea was abandoned quickly.  I came across an entry in Alec Soth's Archived Blog where he speaks to these ideas and gives some particularly great examples of circular photographs.  He quotes Emmet Gowin after he came to the realization he could leave the circular images the way they are without cropping them into a rectangle:

"Accepting the entire circle, what the camera had made, was important to me. It involved recognition of the inherent nature of things. I had set out to describe the world with my domain, to live a quality with things. Enrichment, I saw, involves a willingness to accept a changing vision of the nature of things – which is to say, reality. Often I had thought that things teach me what to do. Now I would prefer to say: As things reach us what we already are, we gain a vision of the world." 

I’d like to attempt to make my own non-rectangular photographs sometime.  At the moment I won’t because it’s not something that my photography needs for expression, it’ll be without meaning if I do it now.  Someday, perhaps.

© Dipploid (image from a pinhole camera made from a pine nut)

Apart from my rant, today was impressively full of education for me.  I learned how to drum scan!  And oh my goodness is it labor and time intensive!  I have pages and pages of notes on how to scan one black and white, 35mm image.  It took hours for the process to get to a point where beautifully unedited files existed on the hard drive, waiting for Photoshop.  If anyone wants to know the process, I'll definitely detail it, I had no idea what it was all about until today.

Rose