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Agrégation 2000 : Images of New-York, methods of picture analysis

Responsable : Professeur Marie-Madeleine Martinet

 
Can you crack the visual codes of pictures?
 
Photograph taken with a 40 mm lens
 
keys
for a present-day Gold Bug
 
The theory will be found in Villes en visite virtuelle
 

Finding the answers requires raising the right questions first, and here are five of them:

Elevation or perspective?
Frontal or oblique view?
Where is the vanishing point?
How are the distances articulated?
How does the composition relate perpendiculars to diagonals?

 
 
ELEVATION OR PERSPECTIVE?
 

Elevation

Perspective

Option The draughtsman may select to draw a building with the lines of the wall remaining vertical as they are in reality; such views are made of rectangles. 

Interpretation This is the practice in architectural draughtsmanship, and choosing it will make the drawing look professional and technical, like an engineering diagram.

Option The draughtsman may also select to show the verticals strongly converging towards the top, as when a passer-by looks up towards the top of a tall building from its foot ; the volumes approximate conic shapes.

Interpretation This is the practice in landscape and townscape painting, and it will make the picture look like ‘’an artist’s impression.’’

 

The choice is obviously important in cities whose image relies on a skyline of skyscrapers (though only a small proportion of its buildings are actually skyscrapers).

Historical significance:

Around 1930 (when the major skyscrapers such as the Chrysler and the Empire State Building were competing for the title of ‘’tallest building in the world ‘’), numerous artists selected to give views of them as close as possible to the elevation, with parallel lines placing these examples of extreme modernity in the timeless classical tradition of architectural draughtsmanship.

The perspective presentation on the contrary is more frequent in recent views.

It is possible in photography either

  • to have a result close to the elevation, by reducing the convergence of lines with a telelens
    (a lens of more than 50 mm of focal length)
  • or conversely to emphasize the perspective with a wide-angle lens (less than 50 mm).

When analyzing a photograph, it is necessary to guess the focal distance of the lens which was probably employed so as to understand the artist’s intention.

Examples

 

Elevation

Perspective

http://www.esbnyc.com http://www.realtech.com/webcam
The home page of the Empire State Building website shows the hall of the building with its 1930s decorative panel in the centre representing the skyscraper in elevation: this is period aesthetics (Art Deco).

On both sides, the walls of the hall are in perspective (projected as oblique lines); so the view of the past in the distance is framed in a present-day mode of vision. Entering the website is boarding a visual time-machine.

This site shows views of Manhattan from the top of a skyscraper in different directions and at several times of the day. Since it emphasizes the multiple appearances a cityscape takes according to circumstances – and the technology’s capacity to evoke them – it also marks the transformed shape of the buildings due to the perspective illusion caused by the high viewpoint: verticals become oblique lines converging towards the ground.
 
 
FRONTAL OR OBLIQUE VIEW?
 

Frontal view

Oblique view

Option The draughtsman may choose to present a view of a building where the façade is parallel to the picture plane.

Interpretation It gives an impression of stability. It is the practice in architectural drawing or photography, since it maintains the proportions of the various elements and thus allows measurements to scale.

Option Or the draughtsman may prefer to show the building on the angle.

Interpretation It suggests that the viewer can walk around it and see it from different viewpoints. It evokes a dramatic presentation, the building been part of a developing story. This is frequent in films.

 

Historical significance:

Representing New York buildings in frontal view means placing them in a classical tradition. In implicit opposition to the frontal view, the oblique was linked to aesthetics such as the Baroque, then to cinema-like photography. The image of New York having been partly created in films (the website of the Empire Stare Building contains, among others, a list of the films in which it appears), oblique views often conjure up cinematographic reminiscences.

Examples

 

Frontal view

Oblique view

http://www.nypl.org/ http://mcny.org/
In the section on Research Libraries,  Humanities and Social Sciences, the Special Collections include an on-line Photographic Collection with an exhibition on Berenice Abbott’s ‘’Changing New York.’’

In the photograph of ‘’Cliff and Ferry Street, Nov 29, 1935’’ the front view of the skyscraper at the end of a street seen longitudinally underlines the elongated rectangular shape of the building. The photograph was cut to a long format to emphazise the impression of verticality.

This is the site of the Museum of the City of New York, with a section  ‘’The new Metropolis’’ on the centenary of the ‘’consolidation’’ of the five boroughs as ‘’Greater New York’’.

On the homepage of the section, the thumbnails of each borough (giving access to a larger view and section on it) are townscapes in oblique view. This evokes the on-going daily life; it shows each view as a fragmentary glimpse of a larger whole, suggesting a binding movement between the views, as appropriate to images of urban settings whose linkage is recorded here.

 
 
WHERE IS THE VANISHING POINT?
 

Horizon line at low level

High horizon-line

Option In perspective theory, the horizontal parallel lines (such as the bands marking the storeys of a building) seem to converge on a single point, the ‘’vanishing point’’ ; it marks the level of the ‘’horizon line‘’ which is that of the observer’s eyes. When the draughtsman selects a low horizon line by comparison with the building, it suggests that the observer is at the level of pedestrians in the street, with eyes near the middle of the ground-floor.

Interpretation This option makes the viewers share the viewpoint of passers-by, with the buildings towering above them.

Option The draughtsman may otherwise select to draw the buildings with their horizontals converging towards a high horizon line, near their top. This supposes that the observer is on a high standpoint.

Interpretation This option makes the observers dominate the townscape, supposing they are themselves standing on a high-rise and look down on its surroundings.

 

Historical significance:

In the past, low horizons were used to denote the superiority of the sitter. In New York townscape photography, high-rise buildings were, in the first decades of skyscraper architecture, frequently seen at half-height, avoiding extremes of towering or plunging effects. When they occur, they are thus striking.
In photography and film, plunging effects can be obtained by ‘‘high angle views’’ whereas towering objects are usually viewed with a ‘‘low-angle.’’

Examples

 

Horizon line at low level

High horizon-line

http://www.nypl.org/ http://www.nypl.org/
Berenice Abbott’s photograph of ‘‘Department of Docks and Police Station, May 5, 1936’’ gives a view of a low-rise at street level. The horizon line (indicating the height of the observer’s eyes) is also at the level of the eyes of characters in the foreground; so the viewers share the station point of the man-in-the-street. In the same site, the section on Lewis Wickes Hines’s ‘‘the Construction of the Empire State Building, 1930-31’’ shows ‘‘a worker at the edge of a platform, looking North’’ from a high vantage point in the scaffoldings, making us share the dangerous station of the workmen.
 
 
HOW ARE THE DISTANCES ARTICULATED?
 

Foreground

Background

Option Among the ‘’three distances’’ which traditionally structure the landscape so as to give it depth, the painter may select to emphasize the foreground, using the middle distance as a transition towards a distance which serves as a mere ‘’background’’ to enhance the foreground motifs.

Interpretation This is the case in heroic portraiture or classical landscape, where ‘‘foreground’’ signifies ‘‘importance’’ and ‘‘background’’ supposes ‘‘insignificance.’’

Option The painter may prefer to focus on the distance, using the foreground and middle distance as foils to lead the eye towards the central motifs placed behind them.

Interpretation This structure implies that the setting as a whole is important.

 

Historical significance:

The celebrity of Manhattan’s ‘‘skyline’’ implies a reversal of European conventions giving pre-eminence to the foreground (a hierarchy still existent in the language), and an assertion that the city as a whole is the focus of attention.

Examples

 

Foreground

Background

http://www.worldstallest.com http://www.theinsider.com/nyc/index.html
This site focuses on some buildings, and shows close-ups of them. This site gives a view of the whole of New York, and its logo reproduces the famous skyline.
 
 
HOW DOES THE COMPOSITION RELATE PERPENDICULARS TO DIAGONALS?
 

Square framing

Diagonals

Option In a rectangular composition, the draughtsman may select to place main compositional elements on the square built within the rectangle on the smaller side of the rectangle (in red). For the longer side of the rectangle, it is its half that will form the side of the construction squares (in green).

Interpretation The key elements can be found by tracing this compositional grid which points to them.

Option The draughtsman may choose to place the main lines of the construction on diagonals.

Interpretation Like the oblique view (to which it can be associated), this composition emphasizes dynamism.

 

Historical significance:

Selecting these time-honoured methods stresses the rigorous construction of modern townscapes. It is often a way of indicating, in addition to objects, the articulation between the major elements or distances, stressing the framing effects.

Examples

 

Square framing

Diagonals

http://www.whitney.org http://www.nypl.org
In the site of the virtual exhibition ‘’The American Century’’ (accompanying the current exhibition at the Whitney Museum), the timeline allows the user to select (for 1931) Earle Horter’s The Chrysler Building Under Construction. The square within the rectangle falls at the level of the cornice of the foreground building, emphasizing this separation between the foreground and the Chrysler. The squares formed on the half-height create a vertical on the dark band which underlines the Chrysler to the left. In both cases, it is the framing element which is highlighted. Lewis Wickes Hines’s ‘’A worker hanging on to two steel beams’’ shows the man against a gridiron pattern of streets placed diagonally; this emphasizes the oblique gesture of his arm and his unbalanced position.
 
 
 
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MAJ: 22/03/06
 
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