Rethinking diptychs

Anyone can shoot chaos. But the most perceptive photographers can make compelling pictures out of uninteresting moments. – Alex Tehrani

In previous posts, I mentioned my intention of making more diptychs, triptychs this year as I wish to train myself making images that have more visual cohesion. When I made the plan, I had a very different idea as to what makes good diptychs, thinking more along the line of having literal elements that tie the two or three images together as a group.

Two weeks ago, by the suggestion of my good friend Karen, I signed up for a year around online class called “Gathering Light” with Ms. Laura Valenti. Instead of putting the emphasis on honing the technical skills of photography, Laura’s class stresses the importance of finding one’s voice and refining one’s vision. As this has been my goal with my photography in recent years, I took the chance and signed up for the class. When I browsed through Laura’s personal work on her web site, I feel they resonate with me as her photographs are not literal representations of any subjects or moments, instead they are personal inquiries, the sort of getting to know thyself studies as I see it. They are not the work that one normally sees on social media. Some of her work include diptychs, and instead of the usual pairings I see of two images with obvious aesthetics clue that tie them together, with some of Laura’s diptychs, there may not be any obvious visual clues between the two images. With our lesson this month, she explains the idea of simplifying compositions, and the way to make pairings of images that bypass our intellectual reasoning.

I find Laura’s interpretation of diptychs fascinating and I am very taken with the idea of making pairing of image that elicit a holistic emotional response. I am very new to this idea; I have been going through my archives of images hoping they may give me some clues as to I can apply Laura’s ideas to my own collection of images. I must admit it was not an easy task as I found it very challenging to bypass my rational interpretation of images, but after taking the time to experimenting pairing of different images, I started to find there was indeed a visual rhythm to some of my seemingly random images that I thought they might not of particular interest, but after finding pairs of images that worked well together, I started to have an understanding as to how to make the idea work.

I start to find images that fit the theme “motion/ still”, contrasting the two emotions of when something is in chaos at one moment, but with another moment, it is at a complete still. I feel it expresses my feeling about life in general, there are times when things are in full motion and we are in the middle of a whirlwind, but then there are times when everything come to a complete stand still. There is no one moment better than the other, they are snap shots of moments of our life, when most of the time, we have no control over. We bear witness of those moments in time and learn to appreciate the uniqueness for each of them.

Taking Laura’s “Gathering Light” class was a surprise and that is one unexpected twist in life that I embrace. Her teachings so far have given me a very different view to my photography, and it gives a welcome jolt to my creativity. That’s life for us, we cannot plan every moment. It’s best to take it as it comes.