From The Vault of Art Shay: Pictures Can Be A Lot Of Crop

By Art Shay in News on May 30, 2013 6:00PM

Josh Murphy paused at a Calder statue to document its red compositional insistence of coming sundown. Looking at the full frame image, I now better see the artistry of his shot: The monster statue eating the sunset machinery of composition and space. I originally felt the reflection of the sun on the office windows was too overwhelming and everything else was fine. There are very few absolutes in photography.

In Kenya, in 1955, I took the picture of a young lion-hunting Masai warrior as a possible cover for an NBC publication. I was so distracted at the corniness of my assignment I didn't bother to crop out the rented Chevys in the background. The kid's smile further doomed the picture. But I whipped out a 7-frames-per-second spring-wound Bell & Howell Foton and grabbed seven more dynamic shots. The whirling sand? Photographer's luck due to the weird design of the Foton's shutter.

Many a hunter and dog lover has hung this picture on the right on his wall. I merely cropped out the—to me—opprobrious ceiling light. Any bright compositional object tends to detract from an otherwise simple composition. Just to make sure, the dog cleverly worked his way into the next office to see if the rest of the poor stag's body was mounted there. (It wasn't.)

An all-night beauty shop on Ashland Avenue at 1 a.m. caught my eye for a <em>Life</em> picture on my Algren project. I made several in black and white noting Algren's remark that we all wanted to have hair like the dummies but in real life looked more like the Polish grandma under the Martian dryer.

A simple cropping by the Jon Scott Lab in Chicago—one of the best in the country—refocused my simple picture on my subject and the possibly relevant sign.

A Miller Beach, Ind. farmer I knew was bemused by a widowed swan and her suitor, an unlikely pig—a paradigm, my wife used to quip, of the average male-female relationship. Before I turned my picture in to <em>Life</em> I printed it as cropped. Many a buyer of this picture has written that the picture represents him and his wife... One company CEO hung it in his office with the caption: "I may be a pig, but I like to swim with the swans."

(Legendary Chicago-based photographer Art Shay has taken photos of kings, queens, celebrities and the common man in a 60-year career. This week, Art shares tips on how to make your photos better with a bit of editing.)

It is Editor-in-Chief Chuck Sudo's idea to have me do a few blogs designed to help you photo shooters out there see your work in, as it were, a new light.

Instead of beginning with myself and my early Garden of Eden pictures, working the snake into unlikely compositions but still respecting Eve's tits, or even using the simulacra of photo images to suggest the existence—to say nothing of the hegemony— of God, instead of loaded images that would delight any cleric with a flair for suggestively religious images, let me start with the work of one of my star pupils, Josh Murphy, a birdspotter of long years' experience in many exotic countries-and just recently a world class wielder of the phone-camera.

Josh said of my edits to his photo, "I think you are at least a genius, and probably more. I love how you found the gem in my Calder phone snap hiding in plain sight. I once remarked to you that people of your exalted state could not be great teachers because they expect the same level of vision and clarity from their students. I was wrong. Everything I now know I know because of you. You are the master and I feel great honor to walk by your side."

If you can't wait until this time every Wednesday to get your Art Shay fix, please check out the photographer's blog, which is updated regularly. Art Shay's book, Chicago's Nelson Algren, is also available at Amazon.

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