Beyond initial impact in photography composition with movement and counterweights
Hi Cem and Congrats Ayla!
I'm so glad to welcome you photograph!
This is a picture of just a portion of the upper face, 3/4 of the left eye and then including the nose in light and them the right side of the face in darkness. The most noticeable and distinguishing feature is that the iris is sharply in focus and almost white. There's a narrow black border with no white matte to relieve the picture. It's interesting, there's no emotion evoked, but it's obviously a work driven by a thoughtful creative process. My take is that this might be the beginning of this enterprise and not the full exploitation of the driving creative energy behind it.
Certainly this is a unique image. In passing pictures on a gallery wall we'd certainly stop to look. However, can the picture draw one in? The secret lies in what there is to enjoy, be challenged by, intrigued, inspired, angered, driven to rebel or just perhaps overwhelmed with beauty and once in a while even loosing one's breath and feeling one's heart racing.
Points in a composition draw us to the site and stop movement. Now to make a composition work we need other signals to get going again. These can be lines, curves, interesting textures or patterns or a prominent color, for example.
I have to guess what the overarching idea is in this image. I'd guess it's the act of observing. I'd experiment with adding to the picture balancing or asymmetric objects or design elements to create balance and or tension. I have experimented with the photograph and there is a lot of potential but this must come from Ayla, herself, as the artist or it might detract, deform or even hijack the variations of this that are there in her own mind.
I can say, however, that the border works against any idea of peeping out beside something as the border goes all around. Border anyway should rarely be used, as there is a huge risk that we are imprisoning the photograph. Here the border effectively neutralizes the eye and says there's nothing more and there is not enough of a substantial barrier or wall beyond which the eye is peeping.
Is the Eye of the Beholder" the title? If so the detailed texture of the skin detracts from this, but it does give us guidance to the meaning and it works.
Kudos Ayla on taking on a huge challenge. Art entails expressing some version of the ever-morphing dynamic living visions we have that we want to get on to paper. You have done that. However, it's an iterative process and the camera cannot create for you the relative importance of components and the nuances that bring to life you vision. Hardly ever can one take a photograph to express what's in one's mind and achieve that image in all it's vigor without much more work in the image the camera's dumb eye delivers.
The exception is of course those professionals and artist whose vision is reality and they are expert in getting the approach, perspective, composition and lighting exactly right and so, designing within the limits of the camera's dumb eye, they reproduce, in a particular impactful way what they chose to see.
For much creative art, we need to go beyond that, either by staging the set or by altering the photograph that the surrogate eye in our camera is able to see.
My suggestion is to open the picture up by removing the frame and experimenting with adding features to create a fully demanding picture that goes beyond initial attention getting and gives us reasons to linger and get into the world you have created.
Kindest wishes and a hug to you both,
Asher
