My favorite film photographs, shot by the likes of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Nick Brandt, and Fan Ho, were all made under the assumption that composition is the one crucial component, the secret sauce that makes a great photograph. I thought of this as I wound my very first roll of Ilford HP5 black and white film into the body of my camera. I wasn't looking to embody or imitate the styles of these great artists, though I did resolve to keep this "composition first" philosophy at the center of the work I'd shoot on my first roll of film.
After wasting a few frames to test that I actually had a grip on the fully-manual controls of the Pentax K1000, though, I decided that my philosophy for this first roll of film would be composition only, not composition first. This means that I wouldn't so much consider subject matter or theme, but that I would only fire my shutter if I was looking at a shape or form I found compelling its own right, regardless of whether or not it was something as pedestrian as a street curb.
So, these selects from my first roll are merely studies in composition, line, shape and negative space.
Sky
I snapped this first image on the grass in front of O'Hare Hall on Fordham's Rose Hill campus. I don't know what compelled me to make a picture of a little plane edging towards the border of the frame, and truthfully, I had no idea that the cloud forms in the image would turn out the way they did. When the Color House on Lafayette street developed, scanned, and sent the full roll of images to me, though, this picture stood out as one of my favorites. The darkness in the upper left corner of the frame, the bright whites of the clouds, and the pure black silhouette of the airliner in contrast to the gray tones behind it evoked a feeling of mystery when I saw it for the first time. Also notable, to me, is the pronounced static-like grain across the whole image, as well as the subtle horizontal lines probably made by imperfections on my camera's sensor. Not surprising; the thing was made in 1976, so I'll have to regard those as an endearing quirk of the camera's age.
Sausages
I took this picture at Arthur Avenue Ferragosto, looking return home with one composition that captured the day's spirit of remorselessly gorging on meat, cheese, bread, and sangria. At the festival, Italian sausage and peppers sandwiches seemed to be the crowd's snack of choice, as the booth's line stretched from the middle of the block to the corner. When I walked past the grill on my way to the end of the line, I was fascinated by the swirling shapes the sausages were rolled into, and I knew I wanted to capture the pattern they made in a frame.
Curb
This is by far my favorite picture on this roll of film. The s-shaped line made by the curb in the center of the frame in contrast to the dark, wet blacktop found outside Rose Hill's Keating Hall led my eyes quickly to the edge of the frame and left me questioning.
It is purely a shape, though, and it means absolutely nothing, but I feel like I'm a better photographer for having found and captured it. When I'm out with my camera, I operate under the assumption that there are interesting compositions waiting everywhere, but because I don't see the world as a rectangular frame, I miss almost all of them. Every time I'm lucky enough to notice a captivating shape or line in something mundane, it dulls the frustration that comes with a sad truth about photography: no matter who you are and what kind of images you make, most of the photographs you take are going to be shit. Most of the images I've ever taken have been horrendous, but sometimes they're not, and for me, the process of separating the successful pictures from the awful ones has been just as important and formative of my style as the work done behind the camera.
Crosswalk
I took this waiting to cross Fordham road a couple of weeks ago. This is my least favorite of the batch, but I included it because even though it's a snapshot of a crosswalk, it made me consider the cracks in the white paint and the peppery appearance of the asphalt, which I wouldn't have ever done hadn't I fired my shutter at the time. Because of the picture's minimalism, I felt it sequenced well with the others in this slideshow.
While I'm not as proud of these images as I am of any of the digital photographs on this site, this sequence charts my first attempt to explore a concept since my turn to film. It is a worthwhile entry into my body of work, and an encouraging first shot at this unfamiliar form of photography.