The Heart of the Photograph

I don’t want this brief discussion to be about abstract photography (a movement all its own), but about using abstraction when more literal techniques just don’t work, or when the image you want to make is about so much more than the actual thing you’re photographing. I want to encourage you to make the occasional foray away from the literal.

Abstraction isn’t the only way to do this. Impressionism, too, as it is explored by photographers, is incredibly liberating and offers creative options that more literal techniques do not. Spend an afternoon with the paintings of Monet, Cézanne, Van Gogh, or J.M.W. Turner, to name a few, and you will see the power of what came to be known rather spuriously as “Impressionism.” Spend that same amount of time ...