One of the reasons for starting this blog was that Instagram limits images to squares, or at least works best in that format. The blog gives me a chance to show larger images, and photograms with different dimensions. I’ve shown this one on Instagram, placing it horizontally, but originally I had it in a vertical frame, as it is here.
Staring at it now, I realise it has a slightly off-putting hint of a skull; a couple of dark eyeholes, the suggestion of a cheekbone. It may just be me, but photos with any sort of linear shape begin to look like faces or figures if placed vertically. If I turn the image horizontally my eye inevitably looks for a landscape, a seascape, with or without a clouded sky.
The tug towards landscape reminds me of my first enthusiasm for a black and white photographer. As a young hillwalker I got hold of the books of Fay Godwin; ‘The Oldest Road’ (about the Ridgeway in Berkshire), ‘Our Forbidden Land’ and ‘Remains of Elmet’. The third was the best, published in 1979; poems by Ted Hughes, photos by Godwin. Dark, brooding Yorkshire skylines. Drystone walls snaking across moorlands.
Dave Eva Photograms 