User:Alecioferrari/INTRODUCTION

From Landscape to Portrait: How aspect Ratio changed the way we perceive the world.

INTRODUCTION The Meeting

It was 2016 when I first met Francesco Giusti, an Italian photojournalist born in Milan, Italy in 1969, part of the international photography agency Prospekt.

Prospekt is representing several photographer worldwide and promoting projects that have a documentary and humanistic vision, either when dealing with news, society, environment, politics, culture or when expressing a more personal and intimate narrative of the human condition.

Francesco Giusti was the father of an acquaintance, Amiel, a girl that I knew since around 2010, during my first years of high school. I was attending scientific high school in Milan and exactly during that time I started to discover photography and explore the photo-camera as a creative tool.

I was aware that Ariel’s father was a well experienced photographer, my past self would have love to meet and have a chat with him but I felt too young, inexperienced and definitely too shy to show up with the request of meeting his father.

He has a solid 30 years of experience within the documentary photography realm, he primarily worked in Africa and South American countries, oriented toward the investigation of contemporary, social and identity related issues, exploring different approaches from photojournalistic essays to portrait stories to long term documentary based projects.

He uses photography as document, as reflection of reality, creating a consecutive and rational visual narratives, producing bodies of work for international newspapers and taking part in photojournalism prizes. Intuitively, he’s visual language can be found in the fundamental tradition of documentary photography widespread during the last two decades of the last century.

Looking back to my experience, in April 2016 there was the Milan Photo Festival, a series of exhibitions, workshops and portfolios reviews. I wished to take part in the reviews once I found out that one of the reviewer was Francesco Giusti: his name appeared again in my mind and I decided to reserve a spot in order to meet him.

During that time, I was exploring different aspects of documentary photography, I was already detached from the “traditional” way of doing photo reportage, but that visual culture formed my mind and my taste since the very beginning. I didn’t have a solid project at that point, but I was working on a collection of images shot during the previous years, and I would have liked to receive feedbacks on that selection.

The meeting went “alright”. He was honest, direct, straightforward, as his imagery seemingly. His judgment of my images was crude but constructive, without filter but with a reason, I loved and hated that approach.

Now, in time perspective, I believe that that was the best approach, I was a young and naive amateur, I was very driven and convinced of what I was doing, and cutting remarks would have adjusted my direction without excessively tearing me down. I still believe that telling the straight thoughts is the best way to challenge someone’s else idea or approach.

The meeting went deeper, and more than half of our conversation outset to gravitate around a single topic: the orientation of the images. The project I was presenting was a collection of both digital and analog photographs. The content of these images were mainly portraits, few landscapes and details of objects. At least 70% of these images were shot in portrait (vertical) orientation.

This exact detail made up the whole further conversation.

He was definitely surprised to see so many vertical images in a kind of reportage project. He was manifesting mixed feelings in between of being annoyed yet astonished, noticing a tendency in young photographers - and myself included - in using the portrait orientation as preferred format.

Giusti started to come up with inquisitive questions such as: how can you tell a visual story in such a narrow space? If you had the chance to use a wide space, why you didn’t use it? He definitely had an argument and position, there was certainly an innate curiosity involved, but also a sentiment of reproach, something like: “You young guys are doing it wrong!” He seems to initiate realizing that there was a generational shift in the way upcoming photographers see, investigate and represent reality; but still he wasn’t completely understand it.

Francesco Giusti listed a series of reasons why documentary photography is born as horizontal and why we should continue to carry on in that direction. The very first reason he brought was a matter of space: shooting horizontally means having substantial wide space to include different elements in the scene, adding people, buildings, elements, in order to deliver a more comprehensive narrative.

The second explanation was a matter of natural visual perception: in the western world we are use to read texts from left to right, and accordingly we apply that procedure to the reading and understanding of an image, in a vertical shot, instead, you can’t have this horizontal natural flow and lines of reading.

The third reason was historical inheritance faith, something like “photojournalism as always been horizontally therefore that is the way it needs to be”, which sounds like a dogma - definitely annoying for me to hear.

Then there were other reasons such as the relation to the horizontality of cinema, the horizontal position of human eyes and computer or television screens that are generally in landscape format.

Initially I was feeling attacked by all of these rules and preconceptions, even though were pretty legit and well explained motivations. In my opinion, he was imposing his doctrine too forcibly, especially on a subject matter were rules are volatile, and freedom of execution is well accepted. But then, my most rational side came back to my mind, remembering me that decided to attend this review for this exact reason, which was to receive feedbacks, criticism and trigger new ideas.

My immediate response to that critique wasn’t exactly firm, until that day I have never pointed that much attention on this aspect of my practice and that was surprising and interesting to me. I tried to explain that I was more interested in single subjects or individual objects rather than in the action of the scene. I was also mentioning there were too many “void spots” in horizontal frames, while vertical allowed me to compress and select more a single fraction of the scene.

The portfolio review ended, and despite I received such strong statements and sentences, I was feeling enriched as I added one more tool to my visual reading approach.

Now, in perspective of 5 years after, surprisingly, most of my photographs production still consists of vertical images, and I feel drawn to vertically orientate my camera in front of natural landscape as well.

The conversation I had with Francesco Giusti, in a sense it did’t function in the practical approach - it didn’t changed my mind - but probably most important, it made me aware of what I was doing and why; it raised questions and investigation in regards of my own visual production.

This conversation as been influential as it triggered questions such as: why do I prefer shooting images in vertical? What is the meaning of the frame? What kind of results these choices produce in the observer’s mind? How our ability of interpret images has changed through time and technology? These are some of the fundamental questions I would like to investigate within my thesis research.

NOTES: this text represents the very initial introduction to the themes of images orientation, observer perception, cropping factors.

My idea is to develop further in the thesis the reasons why I’m drawn to the vertical orientation in shooting images, talking about my thoughts and my own work.

In order to create a solid conversation I will bring historical support and references to the history of the frame in relation to the technology, approach and the observer.