ยฉ Guy Le Querrec
Play What Isn’t There
One of the things Richard Kalvar left at the workshop was a sharp line: even empty space is an active element, it has to be there for a reason. It sounds obvious. It gets hard when you try to apply it to your own material, because on the street a photographer keeps trying to fill the frame, to catch as much as possible at once. The empty space is what’s left over, not what you decide.
In music someone made the opposite choice systematically. Miles Davis used to repeat a short formula to his musicians: don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there. “Kind of Blue” (1959) is the record that puts that idea at the center, modal jazz built on silences and suspensions instead of harmonic accumulation. The break from bebop is sharp. Nobody races to fill every bar, the band leaves air so the listener can step in. Davis works with the nothing as if it were material.
In photography it works the same way. Inside the frame the empty space is active information, telling you where nothing is happening, and by contrast it isolates where something is. A crowded square shot from inside the crowd almost never works; the same square shot with an emptied corner in the foreground tells both things, the presence and the gap. Whoever learns to hold the emptiness chooses where the reader looks.
A direct exercise on your own work. Take an image you’re satisfied with and cover the main subject with a finger. If what remains is a composition that holds on its own, for the light, for the lines, for something happening at the edges, the empty space was working. If nothing remains, the empty space was just padding. Tough but honest.
Empty space as a choice isn’t decided afterwards, it’s decided in the moment you raise the camera. Facing a scene, choosing where not to point the lens is as much a compositional act as choosing where to point it. Davis knew this at the piano, Kalvar knows it at the frame. Learning to trust the nothing is slow, and one of the few things that shift a signature.
Marco Savarese
Editor-in-Chief
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marco Savarese
Marco Savarese is Editor-in-Chief at Eyeshot, the independent publisher he founded in Italy in 2018. He spends most of his year reading portfolios, judging the Open Call, and editing the magazine catalogue. The reading desk is open, and he takes one-to-one Professional Reviews from photographers working seriously on long-term projects.
Who Finishes Your Photograph
NOTE #210. A photo isn’t finished until it survives to where people see it. Paul Strand chose hand photogravure for Photographs of Mexico so the printed copy kept the tonal weight of his prints. Protect the tone to the end, or the worst medium decides for you.
What the Dark Does
NOTE #209. A face lost in shadow reads as underexposed, a defect to fix. Gordon Willis kept Brando’s eyes in the dark in The Godfather and held it against the studio. Before you rescue a shadow, ask what it does; if you can say it, you decided it.
The Place After
NOTE #208. Of a huge event, often only an ordinary place is left. In On This Site (1996) Joel Sternfeld photographed fifty banal American places where violence happened, each with a line of text. Photograph the aftermath, and let the line do the work.
The Photo Made Together
NOTE #206. Street photography teaches you to steal people; there’s another way. In Malick Sidibรฉ’s Bamako studio the youth chose how to be seen. Before you take someone, ask how they’d want to look, and make the photo together.
Write Your Own Rules
NOTE #205. The thing that improves you most isn’t a new camera, it’s a short list of your own faults. Tony Ray-Jones kept a notebook of orders to himself and it shaped Martin Parr. Write your three rules and keep them in your pocket.
Watch the Master Work
NOTE #204. You don’t learn from a master’s finished prints, you learn from watching them work. In 1962 Joel Meyerowitz watched Robert Frank shoot, quit his job that day, and picked up a camera. Watch the body, not the result.
The Work Before the Name
NOTE #203. The worth of a photo and the worth of the byline are two different things. Koudelka shot the 1968 Prague invasion anonymously as ‘P.P.’ and revealed it sixteen years later. Photograph what must be photographed even when no one will know it was you.
The Subject You Run From
NOTE #202. The strongest subject you have is the one you’d rather not photograph. Ishiuchi Miyako went back to Yokosuka, the occupied base town she was taught to fear, and made it her life’s work. Point the camera where it’s uncomfortable.