Perhaps composition and story are the Yin and Yang of street photography. Many of the blogs I have written lately deal with issues of composition. There are a number of reasons for that. For one thing, I have never studied art, so there is a gaping hole in my knowledge of design principles. Second, I have come to believe that the human brain is relatively hardwired in how it takes in visual data. The first hurdle every photographer has to get over, is to convince the viewer that the photo is worth their time to look at. Compositions that use the Gestalt Principles, or Golden Ratios, for example, are more likely to succeed in getting viewer interest. In my mind, composition is the way we get humans to take the visual data in. It is the precursor to story, which is what we want our viewers to take out of our photos.

There are many ways we can create story. For example, street photographers are on the lookout for an interesting character, because the novel or unexpected has the potential to be a story starter. We also look for interesting and identifiable human expressions, which can have two components, gesture and facial expression. Today’s blog is about facial expression.

Communication through facial expression was studied in the 1970s by psychologists, Paul Ekman and Wallace V. Friesen. The contractions of facial muscles in the eyes, eyebrows, nose, lips, mouth, chin and jaw were categorized in the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) as 26 Action Units (AU). It was found, for example, that a person feeling sad lowered their eyebrows (04), but raised their inner eyebrow (01). They depressed their lip corners (15) and raised their chin (17). These facial expressions were found to be universal. It was shown in the research that indigenous people in Papua New Guinea, who had no experience with outside cultures or media, and also people blind since birth, all make the same facial expressions, including the expression for sadness.

In our day to day communications, we read facial expressions as a guide to how a person is feeling and how we might appropriately interact with them. It is no surprise that facial expressions captured in a street photo can convey a story.

• Boredom

• Awe

• Pensiveness

• Exasperation

• Surprise

• Fear

• Disgust

• Anger

• Happiness

• Sadness

• Contempt

• Hatred

Humans tend to mirror behavior. When we see fear, we feel fear, a principle that was used with such great effect in the movie, Psycho. When we look at a photo, we can read the emotion of universal expressions. We are then likely to relate to the emotion and then feel it. That is a story starter for a street photographer.

Now for a little color theory.

Purple

The last color to be discussed in this part of color theory is purple. It is my favorite color, but I have found that a little goes a long way.

Purple is associated with:

Strength
Prestige
Ability
Luxury
Wealth
Virtue
Comfort

Purple Heart

The flip side:

Introversion
Suppression
Decadence
Inferiority

Dedicated to Street

Universal Expressions