New Vision

• Key high: about 30–45° above eye level, angled down.

Shadow edges

Shadows with crisp outlines, cast by a small or distant light: direct sun, a bare flash, a spotlight.

Shadow depth

Dark shadows that still hold some detail (a high lighting ratio, about 4:1 to 8:1: the shadow side two to three stops darker).

Shape & form

Shadows thrown away from what casts them (a figure’s long shadow, railings on a wall) that become shapes of their own in the composition.

This plan is worked out from the style’s choices, so it is drawn as a schematic. One way to get the light, not a record of how any photograph was lit.

Then

35–50 mm · f/4.5–f/11 · 1/500–1/50 s on full frame, inferred from the gear and the look. Rodchenko's 9 × 12 cm plate camera, 4 × 6.5 cm Ica and Leica, Moholy-Nagy's 6 × 9 cm Ernemann: normal lenses, about 35–50 mm equivalent. Exposures are inferred: hard sun at f/4.5–f/11, 1/50–1/500 s, within the Leica's 1/20–1/500 s. Photograms need no camera.

Focal length

Roughly the eye’s own perspective; no visible distortion.

Angle

Looking down on the subject. Looking up: the subject towers. Straight down onto a table, floor or ground. The horizon deliberately off level (Dutch angle).

Balance

Tilted lines and oblique movement drive the picture.

Crop & fill

The edges cut into the subject: heads, limbs or objects run out of frame.

Depth

Depth collapsed into pattern and flat shapes.

Instant

Movement stopped dead by a fast shutter or flash.

Treat people as figures in space, not sitters: from far above as they walk across a square trailing shadows, or from below as they climb a ladder, lean over a balcony rail, leap or lift their face to the sky. Bodies are bent into angles and cut by the frame; people rarely look at the lens or pose for it, and groups march or exercise in step.

Body position

Caught or posed in mid-step, one foot lifted, clothes swinging.

Without a pose

No people at all, or people so small or far off that their pose does not read (hands alone are Hands alone).

Nothing is styled: people wear their own everyday clothes, swimwear, sports kit or uniform, and streets, roofs, bridges and machines are taken as they stand, with no backdrop, props or make-up. For photograms, ordinary things (glass, wire, combs, strips of paper) are laid straight on the paper.

Clothes

What people happened to be wearing; nothing chosen for the picture.

How much is styled

Nothing dressed, made up, moved or added for the picture.

Monochrome

A black-and-white scale pushed towards pure black and pure white, with few middle greys. Rich blacks, clean whites and every grey between.

Film

A small handheld camera: quick, mobile, grainy when pushed.

Digital & other

Photograms and chemigrams: images made on light-sensitive material without a camera.

Shown in

Pictures made for magazine pages and spreads. The book as the main form of the work.

Stay away from soft focus & diffusion, gum & pigment processes, eye level, formal posed portrait, nostalgic, studio props and stiff & held still.