EX67 Emotional Halves
Molly Bang in her book ‘Picture This, How pictures work’ claims that ‘the upper half of the picture is a place of freedom, happiness, and triumph; objects placed in the top half often feel more spiritual.’
She goes on to say that when we are up high we feel we are in a stronger tactical position as we can see our enemies and throw things down on them. Down low we can’t see very far and are more vulnerable.
She says that ‘if we identify with an object that is in the upper half of the picture, we tend to feel lighter and gayer. If we want to show the spirituality of an object we tend to place it up high. … this is due to the force of gravity; objects that are higher up give a sense of floating or flying or otherwise escaping the gravitational pull of the earth.’
She points out some expressions that reinforce this notion in our language.
‘Top of the morning to you.’
‘Top Gun’
‘Top draw’
‘Top notch’
‘Things are looking up’
‘I’m high as a kite’
Now when we address the lower half of the picture space, she claims that it ‘feels more threatened, heavier, sadder or constrained; objects placed in the bottom half also feel more grounded.’
‘Down in the dumps’
‘Feeling low’
‘Feeling down’
‘Living the low life’
‘Low down dirty dog’
So we see the top half as sky and the bottom half as earth / grounded.
“There is an off corollary here, which at first seems contradictory; an object placed higher up on the page has ‘greater pictorial weight’. This simply means that our attention is drawn to the same object more, or it feels more important, if it is higher up than if it is lower down. We must feel that most things truly belong on the ground, and we are perturbed when this is not the case. All other things being equal, if we want to put more emphasis on an object, we tend to place it in the upper half of the page. It tends to feel freer, less attached to the earth, and lighter, but it also has greater pictorial weight.
To test this we are going to experiment with where we put the main subject. When we take photographs for this exercise we are going to take at least two. One with the main element in the upper half and another with the same main element in the lower half. We will process them both with the same look and colour pallet, so that we don’t end up with colours altering our testing of this theory of Molly Bangs.
Post both so we can compare how our feelings change with both positions in the photograph.
The discussion needs to center around how each makes us feel for the object.
The ideas expressed in this exercise were first discussed in the CO2 Angular Emotions Presentation. https://www.lensschool.com/content/co2-angular-emotions
Please post your photographs here https://lensclub.discussion.community/post/ex67-emotional-halves-10528073?pid=1311562396#post1311562396
References quoted from:
PP 54-57 ‘Picture This, How Pictures Work’ Molly Bang, Great Wall Printing, 2000
Otherwise photographs and text copyright © Len Metcalf 2020
