Shadows and walkers – Munich, Germany (2015)
Some people wonder how much of photography is art and how much is chance. There is never an easy answer to this. The answer actually depends on many factors, not the least of which are the skill level of the photographer and the subject matter.
Photography masters hone their artistic skills over many years and often times focus on a specific photographic genre. Henri Cartier-Bresson concentrated on street photography; Ansel Adams concentrated on grand landscapes; and Robert Capa concentrated on war photography. This doesn’t mean these great photographers only photographed those genres, but that was their primary subject matter and it was in those genres where they developed what is know as their “visual language”.
They developed their visual language by carefully picking their subject matter, composing their images in their camera and then waiting for the perfect moment to make the picture. This allowed these photographers to slowly reduce the element of chance in their photographs so a greater and greater percentage of their pictures were what they had visualized. They got to the point where their photography was mainly art and relatively little was left to chance.
For the picture above, I was visiting Munich and noticed the wonderful, diagonal shadows falling on one of the walls near Marienplatz. What made the scene more interesting for me was the diagonal checker pattern on the door and the poster of the woman on the top of the wall.
I stood there, focused my camera and waited for someone to pass through in the perfect location. Though Marienplatz is a busy place, finding people walking in the exact position without any distracting movements was not easy. I waited for about 15 minutes until I felt I had the picture I wanted. The picture above was the first and gut reaction picture I made. I made a couple of other pictures before the shadows moved out of position, but they were not very good so I deleted them.
I think the picture has quite a few artistic and compositional elements. But there was an element of chance too. If I hadn’t been looking for unusual shadows, unusual posters or unusual doors, I would never have seen the scene. If I had been in a rush, I would have never had the two women in the scene.
So even for this image, I don’t know how to answer whether this image was just chance or if it was the product of artistic skill. Maybe that’s not a question I can answer objectively.