CONTENT, WEAK & STRONG

The relationship between the content and
the geometry of a photograph, and the
difficulty of separating them for analysis, has
caused anguish, or at least sustained puzzlement,
in more than a few writers. Roland Barthes,
for example, considered photography more or
less unclassifiable because it “always carries its
referent with itself” and there is “no photograph
without something or someone.”
As a philosophical issue, this applies to
the finished image and to reverse readings of
photographs, but in the context of making a
photograph, matters tend to be simplified by
knowledge of the task at hand. At some point
in the making of almost every photograph, the
photographer knows what the subject should
be and is solving the problem of how best to
make it into an image.
Content is the subject matter, both concrete
(objects, people, scenes, and so on) and abstract
(events, actions, concepts, and emotions). The
role it plays in influencing the design is complex,
because it has a specific attention value. Moreover,
different classes of subject tend to direct the
shooting method, largely for practical reasons. In
news photography, the fact of an event is the crucial
issue, at least for the editors. It is possible to shoot at
a news event and treat it in a different way, perhaps
looking for something more generic or symbolic,
but this then is no longer true news photography.
And if the facts rule the shooting, there is likely
to be less opportunity or reason to experiment
with individual treatments. Strong content, in other
words, tends to call for straight treatment—practical
rather than unusual composition.
Perhaps at this point the following tale from
British photographer George Rodger (1908-
1995), a co-founder of Magnum, would not be
out of place, even though fortunately most of
us will never find ourselves in such an extreme
situation. At the end of the Second World War,
Rodger entered Belsen concentration camp with
Allied troops. He later said, in an interview,
“When I discovered that I could look at the
horror of Belsen—4,000 dead and starving lying
around—and think only of a nice photographic
composition, I knew something had happened
to me and it had to stop.”