Photography 1: P & P, Proj 21: Making Figures Anonymous

Project 21: Making figures anonymous

In this project the intention was to discover ways of including a person or people in a photograph of a place, while deliberately making them unrecognisable and as a result less prominent.  A successful image will be one that is primarily about the place, but in which one or more figures play a subsidiary role to show scale and give life and to show that it is in use.

Among the common ways of achieving this while shooting are the following:

• Small and many - A crowd of people naturally have a certain dominance because of their numbers, but individually they command less attention.
• Facing away - The human face is such a powerful visual attractant that simply by photographing someone from behind or with their head turned away from the camera alters their relationship to the rest of the image.
• In silhouette - Shooting from darkness towards a bright background communicates "person" but rarely "personality".
• Partly obscured - Figures and faces even partly hidden behind some other object are automatically reduced in visual importance.
• Motion blur - Useful if slightly mannered technique when you have a tripod and the light is sufficiently dim to use a slow exposure.  Needs experience to judge the effect of length of exposure on the appearance of a moving figure.  Light figure against dark background is always more noticeable than dark figure against light background.
• Small human against a dominant location - Extreme size relationship is key.  Figure must have sufficient contrast against the setting to be noticed.  Typically, contrast is in the form of colour difference or tonal difference, (dark against light or vice verse).  Abandon identity.  More likely to give a general description based on clothes and action, e.g. a farmer among fields, a worker in a large factory space, or a climber and mountainside.

 The images produced for this project are shown below:

124809; "Small human against a dominant location".

12848; "Facing away".

3044; "Motion blur".

163043; "Small and many".

When the place is the principal subject, but when it will look better inhabited, it is often useful to find ways of reducing the visual attention that a person or a face tends to command.  There are a number of useful visual techniques that allow the photographer to achieve this objective.