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| Bilbao 2014. |
When people take photographs with their phones, I can guarantee, from observation, that they will take nearly all those pictures with their device held vertically. Every shot becomes a portrait photograph. Photographically, we have become monocular, even though our species and most animals have a binocular pair of eyes. This gives us a landscape context and the ability to measure depth. Whether to see danger more quickly, hunt food prey more efficiently, or take pictures that accurately reflect how we see the world.
Everyone is a photographer now. However, a generation is growing up in a vertical photographic world, missing most of the picture. In fact, two-thirds of it — whenever a TV news programme uses a ‘bystander’ clip of photo or video, they almost always have to frame it with a blurred shot on either side, to fill the television screen space. Instagram and TikTok encourage a default vertical format. Probably a part of the ‘me’ ethos those platforms promote.
As I write this in a little square in a town in Portugal, catching the remains of the autumn evening heat, there’s an accordionist busking. His attention hook is a tiny dog sitting atop his instrument, a poor thing that must have its brain scrambled by nonstop music. Or maybe it has become deaf from it all. There could be a dozen phones pointed at them at any time. All vertical. All ignore the context around the accordionist. When they show the photos to their friends back home, they won’t see the other stories around the scene. The architecture. The street. The audience.
I’ve been a photographer for over fifty years. In the early days, I used smelly chemicals and expensive treated paper to make my final prints, cropping each one on the enlarger to depict what I wanted as the final picture. When the digital era arrived, cameras were still designed to take photos as we see them with two eyes. Over decades of peering through viewfinders, I have made pictures worldwide as a journalist who illustrates his own stories. So, how would the Grand Canyon have looked as a portrait shot? Or a food market in Laos, where a stall-holder lifts your selected live fish from a bucket of water, slashes the head off and wraps the very fresh item for your dinner? Or the dazzling white distances to the horizon of the Salar del Uyuni salt pan in the Bolivian Andes? Or the exceptionally lonely atmosphere of a winter drive through the centre of Iceland?
One of my favourites among all those photographic recollections, I took after mass on a Sunday morning in the old town in Bilbao, Spain. It’s of people congregated outside various tapas bars. There’s no one point of focus in that shot, but looking at the multiple sets of two, three or more people, all animated in their own groups, at least nine different stories are presented. Most would have been unseen in a vertical iPhone photograph.
I’m not wedded to landscape. I'll crop to a portrait for an actual headshot of someone. I use squares when appropriate, perhaps for a couple who don’t need a larger background context. And if a more usual 4:3 picture ratio isn’t appropriate. But in social media publishing, blog links to Facebook, for instance, require widescreen photos, or heads can get chopped.
We live in a landscape world, and while we can photographically focus closely on parts of it, we don't know what to leave out if we don’t have the whole picture. Shoot the world as a Cyclops, the mythical one-eyed Greek monster, and you’re stuck with what you get.
So, next time, turn that iPhone sideways, and leave yourself with all the options.
