Gestalt Principles of Visual Perception - Figure/Ground
I would bet that we all agree who is the subject here.
I think it is fair to say I can be quite contrarian. I suspect that generation after generation of children in my family are deliberately raised to be contrarian. You might ask why. We just don’t love going along with the crowd. Let me tell you when that is handy. If you have a teenager whose friends are say, drinking and driving, you need your child to be able resist peer pressure and say no to getting into the car. It is probably less handy when members of the family like to intellectually spar as a past time. That has limited popularity on the social circuit. Oh, and if I happen to critique one of your photos, you can be certain there will be some “constructive critique”.
I think I am going through a contrarian phase with Gestalt Theory. I am not a Gestalt Theory denier. Far from it. I do think that our minds strive to see things as whole units rather than as individual elements. But when looking at photos that have been posted, I am often more interested in the parts rather than in the whole. It is what allows me to comment on posts.
I have written about Gestalt Theory once before. Honestly, it was not my most coherent presentation of a topic. To start with, I wish I had not mentioned Gestalt Theory at all. I should have concentrated on the Gestalt Principles of Visual Perception. I am not overly interested in the theory, but I am real interested in its application to how humans see things. Consider this scenario.
Suppose every time you saw a face, you only recognized it as a face after you studied the mouth, nose, eyes, eyebrows and ears.
We surely do not do that. We look at a face and know that it is a face without going through it part by part. That ability to immediately know that a face is a face is an example of how we simplify the vast amount of visual information we have to process every day. Humans are indeed driven to perceive things as a whole rather than as individual elements.
When we look at a photo, we have to take in a lot of visual information very rapidly in order to understand the “whole” of what we are looking at. The first order of business is to determine what the subject is. This is the Gestalt Principle of Figure/Ground. Once that determination is made, we know what visual data, the figure, needs to be attended to. The rest, the ground, we do not have to worry about. Our visual life got a little simpler. Simplicity is exactly what our brain seeks. In order to figure out what the subject is, we assign the parts of the photo into two categories: the figure and the ground. The figure is the subject. The ground is everything else.
Photo by Ömer Ateş Kızıltuğ. Used with permission. You can see Ömer’s Facebook gallery at Ömer Ateş Kızıltuğ and his gallery on his website at Ömer Ateş Kızıltuğ. The subject here is very clear. She has been separated from the ground by both focus and tone.
This process is going to be problematic if the photographer does not have a subject in the photo. It happens, believe me. I think that is why I have no interest in most pictures of sunsets. They are often all ground and no figure. It also happens in street photography. Shooting random pictures of people without any intent is apt to yield a subject-less photo. As we say in Alabama, “That dog does not hunt.”
Photo by Pranay Kantal. Used with permission. You can see the original post here. Who do you identify as the main subject? Even though the fellow at the bottom is in the front and relatively large, I identify the fellow at the top of the box pile as the subject. The ladder provides strong leading lines and the boxes and the bird frame him. It does not matter if we agree. It just matters that each viewer can easily find a subject.
Let’s assume there is a subject to be found. How do we identify it? If it is in focus, and everything else in the picture is not in focus, then we have a winner . Photographers use a shallow depth of field precisely because it helps isolate the subject. But there are other ways we identify the subject, which is good, because many street photographers strive to have everything in focus. If focus does not help us, size can matter. Humans will generally attend more to big shapes which are usually in the foreground. If focus and size do not identify the figure, then compositional techniques like framing or leading lines or the use of color or tone can help identify the figure.
Photo by Trevor Gwin. Used with permission. You can see Trevor’s Facebook gallery at Trevor Gwin and his Instagram gallery at @gwintrevor.
Trevor’s photo also has two candidates to be the figure. I asked him which one he considered to be the subject. I want to share his response. “It’s an interesting question, and the answer gets more complex the more I think about it. I usually plan a shot like this before I walk past the window, so I’m thinking of the subject being the window itself. When I press the shutter it is because I’ve seen an interesting person (or people) . But once I get home and editing, the subject becomes the person in the environment, which includes the reflections and his surroundings. That’s why I love shooting through glass, it always creates ambiguity and happy accidents, and often the main subject turns out very different from what I planned. Of course it’s really only the viewers opinion that matters once I’ve posted it.”
This is the bottom line. The one thing you have to have in your photo is an identifiable subject, your figure. The more easily identifiable it is, the better your photo will be received. If you post a visually complicated photo and my comment is that I found the subject, that is actually high praise.