Il taglio non determina i confini del fotogramma

“ . Direi che è inutile cercare regole su un 'buon taglio' perché tutto dipende dalla narrazione. Importante è pensare che l'immagine non finisce sul bordo, l'immagine, specialmente quella fotografica, è un aggeggio ontologicamente molto complesso a tratti misterioso e paradossale. Diciamo che il fine qui è prendere coscienza del mistero del bordo. „

“ .Trovo sempre un poco difficile affrontare discussioni nelle quali è inevitabile entrare nrlla sfera delle convinzioni e dei gusti personali, che in quanto tali sono, o almeno dovrebbero essere, indiscutibili per definizione. „

“ Ora ci sarebbe da fare il passo successivo, dove io non posso aiutare per merito della mia ignoranza, trovare dei dipinti con i medesimi tagli. „

“ The Frame

Since the photographer's picture was not conceived but selected, his subject was never truly discrete, never wholly self-contained. The edges of his film demarcated what he thought most important, but the subject he had shot was something else; it had extended in four directions. If the photographer's frame surrounded two figures, isolating them from the crowd in which they stood, it created a relationship between those two figures that had not existed before.

The central act of photography, the act of choosing and eliminating, forces a concentration on the picture edge—the line that separates in from out—and on the shapes that are created by it.

During the first half-century of photography's lifetime, photographs were printed the same size as the exposed plate. Since enlarging was generally impractical the photographer could not change his mind in the darkroom, and decide to use only a fragment of his picture, without reducing its size accordingly. If he had purchased an eight by ten inch plate (or worse, prepared it), had carried it as part of his back-bending load, and had processed it, he was not likely to settle for a picture half that size. A sense of simple economy was enough to make the photographer try to fill the picture to its edges.

The edges of the picture were seldom neat. Parts of figures or buildings or features of landscape were truncated, leaving a shape belonging not to the subject, but (if the picture was a good one) to the balance, the propriety, of the image. The photographer looked at the world as though it were a scroll painting, unrolled from hand to hand, exhibiting an infinite number of croppings—of compositions—as the frame moved onwards.

The sense of the picture's edge as a cropping device is one of the qualities of form that most interested the inventive painters of the latter nineteenth century. To what degree this awareness came from photography, and to what degree from oriental art, is still open to study. However, it is possible that the prevalence of the photographic image helped prepare the ground for an appreciation of the Japanese print, and also that the compositional attitudes of these prints owed much to habits of seeing which stemmed from the scroll tradition. „

“ Analizzando la serie di avanzi dei ritagli ci di rende conto che questi probabilmente raccontano molto di più che non i volti stessi, ciò che è stato escluso dal ritaglio appare più interessante ed esplicativo. „