5A: Reimagining Visual Framing

Original Image

Cropped Image

The reason I was drawn to the original picture was because of its simplicity and its dynamic use of colors to draw attention to certain areas of the photo. The use of 3 of the most basic colors (black, red, and blue) makes it appealing largely because it is an easy painting to visualize an understand. This ease of understanding in what the original photo is, which it is an eye, is because the Theme of the photo is DIDACTIC, meaning the audience is told what to think. This is because the photo can only be interpreted as an eye, and, for the most, nothing else. The reason for re-framing it the way that I did was to incorporate abstraction into the photo. In my cropped version of the photo its hard to tell exactly what it could be, making it abstract and up to the audience to make up their own mind as to what the photo could be, making the theme ACTIVE rather than Didactic. The two photos have CONTRAST/AFFINITY. They have affinity in color and texture however they have contrast because the themes are so different in that one is Active and one is Didactic, even though the only difference is in cropping. I believe the artist framed it the way they originally did was to establish VISUAL INTENSITY in the photo. The Visual Intensity of the original photo is calm and simple because of the use of only three colors and because of the simplicity in figuring out what the picture is of. Another reason the artist framed it the way he did was because of LINES and SHAPES in the sense that the way humans generally look at things is from left to right which draws our attention to the side outline of the eye. After looking at the outline of the eye, the shape and curvature of the lines make the eye lead us to the tear falling from the eye. Finally, the SPACE in the picture is in an unusual format because of the way it is filled in. One would think that the space around an eye would be of skin and that the space inside the pupil of an eye would be colored in, but int he photo the space filled in around the eye is of red dots, and the space inside the pupil of the eye is a solid color, but its also spots of blue. So the space in the original picture is somewhat uncharacteristic than in normal drawings, but it gives it a strangely appealing and abstract sense to it.