The Art of Photography: Exploring Gesture and Motion

Gesture is an important aspect of photography that can convey emotion, energy, and movement to the viewer. It's not just about taking a picture, but also about using the camera as an instrument to tell a story or evoke a feeling. Many photographers use gesture to add a sense of drama or tension to their images, while others use it to create a sense of calm or serenity.

One famous example of a photographer who uses gesture effectively is Gordon Parks. Parks worked closely with author Ralph Ellison on a series of photographs that explored the theme of segregation in America during the 1940s and 1950s. The most famous image from this series shows a man emerging from a manhole, his head peeking out onto the street. On the contact sheet, there are several different versions of this photograph, each with its own unique gesture. One version shows the man's head peeking out from behind a trash can, while another shows him lifting the manhole cover and looking over his shoulder.

The difference between these two photographs is striking. The first one has a more improvisational feel to it, while the second one is more composed and poetic. The second photograph suggests a sense of energy and motion, as if the man is about to spring into action at any moment. In contrast, the first photograph seems more static and formal.

The use of gesture in photography can also be seen in the work of Hiroshi Sugimoto, a Japanese-born photographer who has made a career out of exploring the relationship between light and shadow. One of his most famous projects is a series of photographs that captures the interior of old movie theaters. To create these images, Sugimoto would typically go into the theater with the lights out and shoot for a long period of time, often several hours or even days. The result is a sense of timelessness and stillness, as if the viewer has stepped into a different world.

However, what makes this series truly unique is the way that motion is implied without being shown directly. Because Sugimoto shoots over an extended period of time, any movement in the theater - whether it's caused by the wind or the sound of a car driving by outside - will be masked by the darkness and the ambient light from the movie playing on the screen. As a result, the viewer is left to imagine the motion that might have been present if the lights had stayed off.

This approach is both conceptual and challenging to execute. It requires a deep understanding of the subject matter and a willingness to experiment with different techniques. However, the results can be truly breathtaking - images that seem frozen in time, yet also convey a sense of energy and motion. This is precisely what makes Sugimoto's work so compelling: he is able to take a simple idea like gesture and turn it into something complex and nuanced.

The assignment for this article is to explore gesture in photography using motion as the central theme. What does it mean to capture motion in an image? How can photographers use gesture to convey energy, movement, or even timelessness? These are questions that will be explored over the next few weeks, as we delve into different techniques and approaches to capturing motion in our photographs.

To get started on this assignment, we invite you to think about your own approach to capturing motion in photography. What techniques have you used before? Are there any specific images or photographers that have inspired you? Share your thoughts and ideas with us below, and we'll be happy to discuss them further. Over the next few weeks, we'll share our own approaches and insights on how to capture motion in our photographs, and explore some of the most interesting and innovative techniques being used today.

As we begin this journey into the world of gesture and motion, we invite you to join us. Share your thoughts, ask questions, and engage with the content below. And don't forget to like, share, and subscribe to The Art of Photography for more articles, videos, and insights on the art of photography.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enokay it is Monday which means PhotoAssignments and in this video I want totalk about Photo Assignment #7which is going to be incorporatingmotion into photography now photographyis a still medium unless you're dealingwith video I'm talking about stillimages though in fact most of thehistory of art if you go all the wayback to cave drawing up throughpaintings and sculpture and photographymost art deals with the still imagenothing moves now the exceptions of thiswould be advancements in filmmaking andvideo work and then even incorporatingelectronics into sculptures but largelyon the whole we're dealing with ourintents and purposes here withphotography and still photography it'ssomething that does not move itrepresents a point in time that this canget conceptual and maybe that point intime gets abstracted a little bit butthat has to be implied within thecomposition and that's what brings me totalking about motion in composition thisis something that has been requested afew times and I want to talk aboutdifferent ways that photographersthrough the history of photography haveinterpreted motion in still photographyand one of the most obvious examples ofthis is to use a slow shutter speed whenyou shoot now I've seen people do thiswith pinhole cameras that are handheldand everything blurs out it reallybecomes abstracted but it does create asense of motion and drama and energywithin the image you could also takethis a step further you put your cameraon a tripod and anything that's notmoving during that slow shutter speedwill stay in focus and then objects thatare moving create a motion blur this ismost evident in a lot of famousphotographs particularly one of myfavorite photographers the work of ErnstHaas was one of the great colorist ofour time but also used motion as part ofhis composition in these beautifulpictures that he did of horses there'swonderful bullfighter and that was kindof one of his things that he did wasusing that slower shutter speed to startbringing that energy into the picturenow a slow shutter speed is not the onlyway to do this that's more of atechnical representation of motion butthis can also be done with fastershutter speeds as well ironically withfairly early photographers and I think agreat example of this would be JaquesHenri Lartigue who i have talked aboutextensively as well and Jaques HenriLartigue - one of the hallmarks to hisstyle was bringing the unexpected thatmoment of energy into the image there wasaction involved they cross the linebetween being fine art images andsnapshots in that sense and so the wayhe Illustrated motion was throughgesture now he was very involved withsports and activities like that and so alot of times you see the gesture ofskaters involved one of my favoritepictures is this one which is just theback of a person looking out over apier and you see the water splashing upnow the water is not really blurry youcan see the droplets but what'sinteresting is if you've ever stoodthere and seen water splash you knowthat it goes down so it is implied amoment of time with something that iscaught in motion and it's a verydifferent approach to just slowing downthe shutter speed and there are otherphotographers that have done similarthings like Martin Munkácsiinstance who I think was really fabulousat this the motion is implied by thegesture or the action or the activitythat's going on and one of my favoriteimages is this sports image that blowsmy mind that Martin Munkácsi tookthis using a handheld large formatcamera so I mean he was really anincredible photographer especially earlyon another photographer who wasinfluenced greatly by both Lartigue andMunkácsi was Richard Avedon and he hasinteresting ways of illustrating motionin his work too sometimes it is with amotion blur but other times that gestureand I'm keep coming back to the gesturebecause I think that is probably one ofthe single most important things thatcan imply motion and even the greatHenri Cartier-Bresson implied it this wayas well in the famous picture of thebicycle the bicycle is blurring but it'snot over accentuated we see this as aleading line that's coming through apretty complex composition in terms ofgeometry but that motion is impliedsimply because we understand a bicycleand the motion that's involved themotion blur that is here is certainlyadding to that but it is not dependenton that motion blur to create the actionin that sequence also interesting arephotographers who have approached motionfrom a scientific perspective and acouple of these we talked about recentlyEadweard Muybridge who did photosequences studying movement in motion ofboth humans and animals would domultiple exposures he had ways oftripping the camera to taking multiplepictures to study so he was introducingthat notion of time and of course thisled to later filmmaking and the wholeidea of using multiple exposuresthat would be played back in sequencebut his were still images and they werestudies of this another photographerthat I greatly admire was the work ofEtienne Jules Marey who was a Frenchscientist and photographer who would rigup these custom cameras and strobelights to study motion in birds did somebeautiful images and some beautifulwork with that another photographer whodid a lot of work for Life magazineusing these motion studies but usingmore advancing technology was analbanian born photographer Gjon Mili whodid something very similar to whatMuybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey hadbuilt on and took it a step furtherusing multiple exposures multiple strobelights and some of the advances oftechnology didn't come along during histime he also worked closely with ascientist by the name of Harold Edgertonwho shot some very famous iconic imagesusing strobes and actually stoppingmotion at a point in time the mostfamous being the bullet going throughthe Apple there's droplets and there'ssome others as well but these were frommuch more scientific perspective and Ithink it's interesting to study thesebecause these are very different waysand different techniques that you canuse to imply motion within an image wecan use the actual motion blur whichcertainly shows that something is movingthat's a tricky thing because at whatpoint does it abstract beyond what wecan recognize what is moving maybethat's the intent that we have I don'tknow the other interesting way oflooking at that is how can you stopmotion and still imply motion not usingslower shutter speeds so in the case ofa lot of these people it's throughgesture it's through action it's throughactually using strobe lights andmultiple exposures but I also want tochallenge this notion - and gesture isan important aspect of photography infact I think it would be cool to do anentire photo assignment just on gesturebecause it can… one image can beinterpreted two different wayscompletely and I'll give you a case inpoint this is a famous image actuallythere's two of them here they're fromthe same photo shoot this is obviouslyGordon Parks and he worked closely withan author by the name of Ralph Ellisonwho had a somewhat controversial novelcalled the Invisible Man and there was aseries that was done there were actuallytwo different ones that they had donewhere they had done a shorter version ofthis that Gordon Parks would do photoillustrations for and the Invisible Mandeals with this guy who lives under thecity and comes up and is able to observeand it certainly deals with segregation thatwas happening at the time and some othervery serious issues but this is a veryfamous photo that was set up of theInvisible Manemerging from the manhole now on thecontact sheet there there there actuallymany different pictures of this andthese two have become very famous and inthe one you just see his head peeking upfrom the street looking up in the secondyou see the gesture if he actually islifting the manhole and looking over hisshoulder and it's a much more composedpoetic kind of thing where as the firstone seems more off-the-cuff moreimprovisational they have two completelydifferent feels to them for mepersonally the second one where you seemore gesture involved at the manholecoming up the way his eyes are leadingoff of the composition it implies moreenergy and more motion than the otherone does now neither one is right orwrong but I'm just showing you that asimple change of gesture can drasticallychange the composition in Gordon Parks'case these are both wonderfulcompositions and these prints are bothvery famous and one's not better thanthe other but I'm just showing you thedifference of just being able to use asimple gesture to imply motion finally Iwant to talk about an example of acontemporary photographer who does thisany more conceptual manner one of myfavorite photographers alive today is isHiroshi Sugimoto who is a Japanese bornphotographer spends half his year inJapan half his year in New York and heis amazing he works in these largeprojects and they involve an in-depthexploration of the subject at hand oneof the more interesting ones that he'sdone this is a few years old now but it was aseries on theatres where he wouldactually go in and shoot movie theatersnow the concept behind this wasintroducing the whole element of timeinto the photographs so what these weredone is he would go into the theaterwith the lights out and the photographthe exposure lasted the duration of thefilm so over the course of an hour and ahalf two hours whatever the film wasthat ends up being completely white onthe screen but then the ambient light inthe room is lit from the movie that'sbeing played and of course this is avery conceptual approach to this andcertainly doesn't show you any motiondirectly in the picture because anythingthat has moved in here really has eithergone completely to white or hadeffect on the overall ambient lightingin the room but it's hard to detectliterally but what we have seen in hereis the introduction of time now this is amuch more conceptual and heady approachand much more difficult to get into butI think it's interesting to show thatmaybe it's not motion directly but it'san implied motion that was there you'reseeing evidence of that and so I justthink the Sugimoto is brilliant andmaybe you're agree maybe you don'tbecause this isn't literalinterpretation of motion but I think itis definitely something that takes it tothe next level in terms of concept soanyway this is the assignment and I'mgoing to actually do this one along withyou guys I'm going to figure outsomething that I want to do with motionand that will be coming up we'll befilming that in the next week and we'llhave two weeks to do this and so I wantyou to start thinking about it now andthen we'll actually get into a littlemore when I give you an example peoplehave requested that I do that I did forthe last one I will do it on this one aswell and anyway I'm really excited aboutthis if you guys have any questions orcomments please leave them below and ifyou enjoyed this video please rememberto like it share it subscribe to the Art ofPhotography for more videos and I willsee you guys in the next oneuntil then later\n"