THE SEARCH FOR ORDER

! ll the visual arts depend heavily on ordering

the various elements according to the
artist’s preference, with the assumption that the
aesthetic” (a term Winogrand, for one, hated).
The critical argument for “informal” composition
was that when used by non-photographers, the
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visual impressions presented by the world are camera occasionally delivered “happy accidents,”
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disordered and often chaotic. Photography is in which what would normally be seen as BUSY4HEMOSTOBVIOUSVARIABLEWASEXPRESSION
no exception. In fact, it requires more effort in tilted camera angles and bad framing created ANDACTIONFROMTHECHILDREN4HISWASWHATYOU
organizing the image than do other arts, for the interesting, unexpected juxtapositions and WOULDNORMALLYEXPECTTOMAKETHEDIFFERENCE
reason that the camera records everything in
front of it. A painter selects from the view, but a
photographer has to subdue, diminish, or hide
the elements that are unwanted. Photographers’
geometry. Sometimes artifacts like camera shake
and flare would contribute, again “happily.” In
the hands of an expert, and made deliberately,
vernacular composition could have artistic value.
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writings on this stress this time and again. The critic Sally Eauclaire, writing on the !SUSUALHOWEVERDESIGNCANADDANEXTRA
Edward Weston, early in his career, in 1922, Color Formalist photographer William Eggleston, LAYEROFIMPROVEMENTASTHESEQUENCESHOWSIN
wrote that for photography, landscape was too typifies the view at the time: “In the careless TIMEORDER4HETWOFINALSHOTSBOTHSUCCESSFULLY
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“chaotic... too crude and lacking in arrangement,” cropping, negligent alignments, and imprecise
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and it took him several years of work to meet the
challenge. Ansel Adams wrote, “For photographic
compositions I think in terms of creating
configurations out of chaos, rather than following
any conventional rules of composition.” Cartier-
Bresson called it “a rigorous organization of the
interplay of surfaces, lines, and values. It is in
this organization alone that our conceptions and
emotions become concrete and communicable.”
The mountaineer-photographer Galen Rowell,
writing specifically about a composition in Death
Valley, begins with, “At first the scene appeared
very jumbled to me....” He is about to leave, when
he thinks again and returns: “The zones that had
first seemed so jumbled now converged in strong
diagonals that I was able to compose by moving
my camera position back and forth.”
In Chapters 1 through 5 we have examined
the tools available for imposing order on an
image, and doing this would seem to be so
basic that the questions of interest are to do
with how and in what style. But what do we
make of photography that appears to deny the
organization of image components? We need
to address this because a significant proportion
of art photography from the 1960s onward
does challenge these norms. It began with
photographers such as Garry Winogrand and Lee
Friedlander in America, and the identification
of what art critics began to call the “snapshot
152
exposures of amateur snapshots, Eggleston
recognized potent effects that under his direction
could produce mesmerizing contrasts and shifts
of conventional emphases.” More recently,
Graham Clarke, on Lee Friedlander’s composition
in the image Albuquerque (1972), writes, “At first
glance it appears as a bland and nondescript
image, but then begins to resonate with a rich
and profuse meaning... It resists any single focal
point, so that our eye moves over and over the
image without any point of rest, any settled
or final sense of unity (and unitary sense and
meaning).” Tellingly, he uses the very absence of
apparent skill to justify the artistic value of the
image. “Resonate” and “profuse meaning” are, of
course, tell-tale signs that the art critic is avoiding
analysis and invoking mysterious insight on the
part of a viewing elite, in which the reader is
invited somehow to participate.
This is the argument, though of dubious
logic. As we saw on pages 94-97, artifacts in
photographs can work very well, but they do
so by trading on what we know an accurately
taken image should look like. In other words,
to be successful and accepted, they can only be
occasional. Willful disregard for the principles
of composition and design can only be justified
conceptually—by saying, in effect, “this is not
a normal photograph.” This, in fact, is how the
snapshot aesthetic has developed in recent years,
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