Gestalt in Photography

By Aischa Erten

I am a Swiss amateur photographer. Like so many others, I developed a passion for photography at a young age and spent endless, joyful hours in my earlier years looking for that perfect shot, without having had a formal education in photography, until recently. When I look back, most images I captured have been of memories of happy moments lived, without much thought having gone into photographic composition. But then, I started reading heavily to improve my photography skills and the more I read about photographic composition techniques, the more I became interested in understanding how the brain processes scenes that it perceives in photographs, which lead me to look for answers in a nearly hundred-year-old theory. This book is my attempt at summarizing what I learned and demonstrating how gestalt psychology can help amateur photographers compose better images by appreciating the principles that have been formulated as part of the gestalt theory. So, in essence, this book has been written for photography enthusiasts who have not had a formal education in photography so far but would like to improve their skills by studying the quirks and biases of human visual perception, in particular by recognizing how the gestalt laws manifest themselves in interpreting real-life visuals. In photography, the explicit use of gestalt psychology has not been prevalent. This may be due to the difficulty that most photographers deal with instantaneous occurrences, where there is no time to intentionally arrange a scene as designers or advertisers can do. Nevertheless, understanding the gestalt principles of perceptual organization has the potential to provide significant insights into mastering photographic composition. In an effort to exemplify the use of the gestalt theory in the art of photography, I provided here brief explanations for four concepts: emergence, reification, invariance, and multi-stability and twelve principles: meaningfulness, conciseness, good continuation, closure, figure/ground relationship, symmetry, common region, connectedness, proximity, similarity, common fate, and synchrony. But obviously, the pointers I provided as to how they can be used in everyday practice of taking better photographs are neither comprehensive nor should they limit the reader's creativity in any way. Every photographer must decide for herself which photographic composition rules to observe and how to use them to create the image she envisions. It took me around two years to take the photographs in the book and yet they are far from sufficient or superior to do the topic any justice. Good photography often involves an element of luck and spontaneity to capture the perfect shot. This is not always possible in a limited time frame. On the other hand, I preferred to set up my scenes and simplify them whenever I deemed necessary to explain the gestalt laws better, which was my main aim in writing this book. While I didn't necessarily intend to capture artistically exceptional photos here, I am looking forward to shooting more photographs with the gestalt principles in mind with the expectation of capturing frames excelling in sophistication and precision in the future. It is my sincere hope that this book will explain where rules of photographic composition have their roots and inspire other photographers to stand out with their art. As a final note, I should emphasize again that this book is not a coffee table photography book. I say this because if one were to buy it expecting photographic perfection, one would be disappointed with many of the 76 images that have been set up simply to explain the concepts. As in any theory, the power is in the knowledge and this knowledge can, in my opinion, not only help to capture really beautiful impressions, but it can also help to appreciate other photographers' artistic works, by looking at them from a different perspective.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B093RZJGDD
• ISBN13: 9798745198649
• Release Date: April 2021
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 138 Pages
• Weight: 0.74 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.3" x 8.5"