Tutorial 4: Negative and Positive Space

For this exercise, I repeatedly subtracted elements from the photograph and replaced it with negative space. I wanted to see the degree I can push it to until the image ‘fails’. The 3 images I have selected for this exercise are, in the order of presentation:

Image Reference: (2017). BTS Spring Day. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEeFrLSkMm8

Image Reference: Bettman, J. (2017). Motorola. Retrieved from: https://www.behance.net/gallery/56755945/Motorola

Image Reference: Huang, U. (2017). Ballet in the Sky. Retrieved from: https://www.behance.net/gallery/56039569/Ballet-in-the-sky

Image 1

By removing crucial elements of the photograph, such as the human faces and figures, it creates an illusion of being hidden away. I first cut away their faces, followed by their entire bodies which heightens the sense of anonymity since the entire human figure is now shrouded. I guess it makes sense in the context of a laundromat as even though commonly romanticised in films, in reality it is hardly a place where people mingle with each other, especially when it comes to a task (of washing laundry) that is highly intimate.

By purposefully removing the door which reflects the outside world, and the clock on the wall, the two key indicators of time in this image, the laundromat seems almost self-contained, and time seems to stop to a standstill.

Next, I repeated it with positive space to see the effect it had on the image. I think the effect is somewhat similar, except that the spaces cut away now appeared to look larger and more expansive. Previously, perhaps due to the dark colour used, the cut-off portions looked rigid and contained. I think colour theory in the later part of the semester might come handy in explaining this.

Behind the scenes: The extracted portions, when haphazardly thrown together, reminds me of a Dada-style collage heh.

Image 2

However, at the end of the exercise for Image 1, I felt that I did not abstract the image enough such that it lost its meaning. At the end of it, even though key features such as the washing machines were removed, I could still tell that the image consisted of people or figures in a room, even though I couldn't quite tell the context of it. I decided to be more adventurous in the second experimentation.

For the second image, I initially started off by wanting to try how removing certain elements would change the focal point of the image. This came from a series of advertisements by Motorola, which each image in the sequence having a red object. In the image that I have chosen, one of the frames, as well as a sphere, was coloured in red. I thought it could have been a symbol of how Motorola's products are always the buzz, focus and talk of the town as are the strikingly red objects in the images.

Thus, I removed the elements in red first. Originally, the focus was on both the red items and the woman in the image. Now, attention is solely focused on the woman.

Next, I removed the woman too. Having a dull colour combination aside from the key elements which I have already removed, the picture being mainly concrete, the focus thus shifted to the blue sky background.

I even tried removing the blue background frame by frame, until...

We are eventually left with a monolith of the concrete frames.

Compared to the version with positive space, the version with negative space did a better job of focusing our attention on the key elements of the picture, due to the contrast between the black background and lighter foreground of the images. I liked how at the end the version with negative space made the monolith/concrete structures looked like they are floating in 'space', or on another dimension not on Earth. This could also be due to light and somewhat cold colours of the concrete panels which gave an impression of moonlight having a gleam on it.

The version with positive space, created the effect that the image might have been overexposed instead!

Image 3

For the third image, I started off with the intention of wanting to experiment with space and position.

First, I cut off the ballerina's face - again, as with image 1, this technique obscures the identity of the person and creates a sense of mystery.

Next, I cut off the flooring following the contours of the image leaving only a thin strip of concrete in the middle. When used with negative space especially, black creates the illusion of depth. The ballerina, originally 'dancing in the sky', now looks like she is undertaking a momentously risky act of crossing a tightrope, with one small misstep that can send her tumbling into the depths below. Coupled with the lack of a face, it gives viewers the sense of danger and fear, that anyone could be in the shoes of the ballerina or tightrope walker, even the viewers themselves.

However, I realised that the impression of depth might be due to us using something else as a reference point for height in the image - the sky. Thus I removed the sky too, and in this case both the effect of depth created by negative and positive space have been uniformly diminished.