A triangle is a circle is a square-finding your subconscious motif

Circle, Mokau Bay

Lately I have been thinking about the importance of motif in our photographs, and this has been becoming ever clearer as I do more and more creativity and design workshops.

I still remember a conversation, albeit a brief one, which I had some years ago, with Craig Potton, the photographer and publisher. I hasten to add that he and I are in agreement on some things, but not the depiction of Nature. Craig is an OSF (Old School Filmie) and I have embraced digital (although I still love film) for the amazing possibilities it has to offer (does that make me a NAD (New Age DIgie)?). Craig uses the most “natural” film he can get (it used to be EPR, but I don’t know if you can get that any more) because he doesn’t want to alter the outer appearance of Nature in any way. I am happy to do so, because it is the inner life of Nature which fascinates me, and it is my response to it which forms the subject of my photographs.

Back to the conversation. Craig talked about the fact that, as he sees it, everyone has an unconscious motif, an unconscious shape which can be seen in his/her work. There are only three shapes, circle, triangle or square, so it must be one of those. As he saw it, his unconscious shape was the circle. Looking at his work, I tend to agree.

Naturally I looked at my own and began to wonder. I noticed that there were clear rectangles in evidence, but decided that this was more a function of being constrained to the rectangular frame of the camera.  I walked away.

Then, as I was doodling one day while I was in the middle of a long telephone conversation, I looked down at the paper I was scribbling on and it struck me. I was drawing triangles of different types; isosceles, equilateral, whatever.  It suddenly occurred to me that when I fidget, I move my feet in a triangular way. Hmmmmm. I went back to my photographs. And sure enough, there it was. My photographs, worked as they were within in a rectangle, were triangular. Subject material was arranged within a triangular arrangement. There would be three trees or three puddles or triangular hill shapes or red located at three places within the photograph. All I had to do was draw inferential lines. Trinity was my name (little 60′s in-joke there).

Then, as I went on and looked at the work of students, whenever I could see a sufficiently large body of work, I noticed this subconscious motif apparent in their work as well. I still do.

So Craig was right.

Ok, I can hear you say. How do I work out my own? Well, look at what you doodle. May be even try it, but you have to let your mind clear and allow your subconscious to have its way. If you concentrate, it isn’t going to work. Play some nice music (probably not Dr, Dre) or daydream (easiest while you are at work) and let your pen have its way. If you draw happy flowers with smiling faces surrounded by petals and circling bees, then chances are you are a Circle person. If it looks like Lego Central, then you are a square person (no, I am not talking about your personality or social inclinations).

So what, I hear you say. Well, if you are aware of this, you can use it to inform your compositions and to step back and consciously consider the visual design elements and approach within your photographs. Visual design and composition are the journey of a lifetime and are never mastered. You merely gain new understandings or refine old ones. One workshop will not teach you everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask. You will still be learning as they nail the lid shut on you (roughly hexagonal and therefore aligned to the rectangle! The nails will however form a circular composition).

Lately however I have begun to wonder whethere there are in fact three shapes at all.

I am coming to the conclusion that there may be, in fact, only one. The circle.

Hear me out.

The basis if all shapes is the point. Stretch a point and it becomes a line( the shortest distance between two points is not a line since there is only one point all along).

Expand a point and it becomes a circle (a point which is hollow in the middle). Thus a circle is not a line where the two ends have joined together like some sort of graphic Ouroboros , but an expanded point, reminding us  that the universe is mostly space ( as are we).

Now take a rubber band, imagine it as a circle, insert three fingers and poke out three sides. Voila. The circle has become a triangle.  Do this with four fingers and the circle has become a rectangle. By altering the pressure we can form a square, a subset of a rectangle.

Point becomes circle becomes triangle or square.

One shape.

Guaranteed to do your head in!

So to this picture.

As so often happens these days, it takes me a while to find the image in the scene. And there is always one. The quiet, shy ones take a little longer to spot.

We had made a trip to Mokau Bay, near Lake Waikaremoana, in the early morning to catch first light and photograph whatever presented itself to us. After photographing the water ( see the post on Impressionism), I was standing there, watching one of the Innerlight students working, when I happened to glance up at the cliff on the opposite side of the bay. It was encrusted with tree ferns with steamed faintly in the blue-green light falling on the shadowed cliff. At first it appeared as a chaotic jumble with no apparent order. Then as I continued to look, the pattern began to establish itself. Visual design and composition are, after all, the art of pattern and structure. I noticed that a group of them formed circular arrangements  which, as I considered them further, formed a spiral shape. Spirals are really the 3-dimensional synthesis of all the shapes deriving from a point.

The rest was realtively easy.

Later reflection brought me to the thought that perhaps my unconscious motif may have shifted; from the  triangle, with its  three only points, to the infinite number of points offered by the circle and the spiral, which added  time to the equation..

Print Friendly

Published on Thursday, August 26th, 2010, under Thinking about Photography and Art