There is a Jungle if Your Framing is Right
A friend once told me a story about the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. Kurosawa was being questioned about the way he framed a particular shot in a movie and the questioner was reading into the framing to much. Kurosawa, stopped him and said that he had no choice but to frame the image in this way because to the left and right were industrial factories.
I often think of this statement when I am in the process of framing an image. Photographers are constantly editing their photographs even before they manifest themselves out of the camera’s body. Photographers make choices, and those choices reflect the meanings embedded within the frame of the images.
I view each opportunity to compose within my viewfinder as the first step in editing my images. What I don’t show is often as important as the way in which the objects find themselves arranged in the photograph.
This image appears to be a jungle, but it isn’t a jungle. It is in fact shot from the third floor of a building on a small university campus. This is what I saw at that particular time and place, fused with my mental state.
There are jungles out there where there are no wilds.