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Talk About Graphic Images!

Well, goldarnit, it just says it right there in the word photograph—a combination of the Greek photos (ϕοτοσ), meaning "light", and graphos (γραοσ), meaning “to draw, to represent by lines drawn,” and originally meant "to scrape, scratch" (with a stylus on clay tablets, though we don’t use them much anymore). (An interesting aside: "heliography," "photogeny," and "daguerreotypy" were used as alternatives until "photography" became universal.*) So the word for our undertaking literally means “light drawing.” In that sense, all of our images are “graphic.”

But there’s another meaning for the word (actually several others, but we won’t go into what graphic images can mean). Here we are concerned with pictures that convey their impact and interest through the lines and shapes that are contained within their borders—on geometry.

In these graphic pictures, the details of the subject(s) are secondary to the feeling and/or thought created by the harmony or clash, the interaction, of shapes. Silhouettes, for example, are pretty much devoid of any detail—they’re essentially graphic images. As you can see below, it is not important that we see detail in the children and huts or in the drooping sunflowers. The pictures are about the shapes (and the colors too – we will get to that in a minute.)

One of the reasons silhouettes work so well is that the lack of detail frees our imaginations to sort of “fill in the story.” Rather than being led to certain thoughts and feelings by an abundance of details to look at and absorb, we can bring our own. The images give us hints (a girl holding a baby, sunflowers so heavy with seeds they can’t stand up straight), but the rest is up to us. It’s sort of like reading a book and forming your own mental images of the characters and settings, then going to see the movie. But I digress….

Of course, all photos are graphic—they’re usually full of all kinds of lines, circles, rectangles, etc. But sometimes you can strip away at what you are photographing and concentrate on the inherently striking graphics. By doing so, you accomplish one of the goals (there are many) of good photography—showing people things in ways they haven’t seen them before. For example:
Not many people are going to lie on the ground so close to really thorny cacti and look up at them, like Cary did below:

Or lug a 600mm f4 lens and tripod up a vertical cliff to turn a mass of flamingos into a zigzag of pink against a blue lake and gray shore. (If you try to do it from a plane, they all fly away. I know, ‘cause I tried that first.)

And pink flamingos bring up color—don’t they always? When you are making graphic images, it helps to think about color as geometric blocks and use them they way you use other shapes. The blue skies in the sunflower and cactus photos are blocks as are pink, gray, and blue in the flamingo one. The water and sky create a graded block in Cary’s picture below:

As do a block of grading red and a block of black, their intersection marked by triangular blocks (pyramids).

It can take a bit of time to start thinking of colors as shapes—we get distracted by the color tones and the textures. You have to train your eye, just the way you have to in order to discern other graphic elements like lines, squares, etc. Though not nearly as gorgeous as the highly textured and toned original of Cary’s image below, I hope the processed image below it will give you some idea:

Here’s an example of trying to use graphics to show people something in a slightly different way. I was dong a “country story” in Kenya, where tea is vital to the economy—so of course I had to include something about tea. I made the picture below, which is fine, but I felt like it was the sort of thing you might see in the annual report of a tea company. So I hunted around for a vantage point, put a 300mm lens on the camera, and got what I think is a more interesting image of the green tea field incised with zigzagging paths and dotted with pluckers.

This idea is really helpful when you are out making photographs but having trouble getting inspired—go for the graphics. Like below. These two images of a volcanic crater were made from exactly the same spot—the top one with a 35mm lens, the bottom with a 600mm. The top one is boring. But by isolating the blocks of color on the crater floor (the color is from minerals in the water), I got something different. (And notice how I waited for the woman to walk through the frame to give it scale. For more on scale, please see “A Portion of Proportion” Actual Info and TipsFlick.)

Graphics also enhance compositions. In the photo below, I purposely centered the courtyard of the Mosque of Ahmad ibn Tulun in Cairo, ignoring the “rule of thirds.” The symmetry of the graphic lines radiating from the center made this the most pleasing composition, and you can see that without the energy of the graphic lines, the image has much less impact. (Notice too that I again waited for someone to walk along one of the paths—scale.)

If you really look around, graphics abound:
In buildings…

In food…

In fields…

In industry…

From the air…

And of and on the sea…

Next time you are out shooting, look hard for graphics. Get the images you want, the ones that got you going and made you feel that you had to photograph the subject. Then spend a little more time looking for that different look—the one you didn’t notice at first and that other people probably will never see (unless you show them).

* Answers.com

All Actual Info and TipsFllix