Cole was a painter. He spent long hours on preparatory sketches and studies. But in photography, we don’t deliberately compose our images. We often photograph the landscape as we find it with some combination of planning and luck. But we choose what, how, and more importantly, when to make the image. These choices can be just as purposeful. You as a photographer must read the landscape you intended to photograph while in the field – previsualizing the final printed version of this work and include or exclude information as necessary.
The signs that you include, or in other words, the language that you use, is personal to you as the artist. In the image below Alley Project A-Frame, 2010, I used the urban vernacular landscape of an alleyway in a specific location of Lubbock, Texas, to reflect on histories, memory, and recent local economic hardship. This image of an A-Frame building shot in a square film format has many various readings. The first level of reading is the shape of the building. The shape of the signifier reads specifically as the shape of an older Whataburger restaurant. But the Whataburger colors of orange and white are painted over with yellow. So, in this case, the signifier is broken, resulting in a visual hiccup or disunion between the signifier and the signified. The hiccup here can be read as a reference to what Roland Barthes called the punctum; that which pricks or bruises the visual bubble created between the artist and the viewer. This reading is furthered by the asymmetrical cloud on the upper right-hand side of the frame. This cloud interrupts the ridged symmetry of the triangle furthering the discomfort. Another reading of this image is through the open narrative of the chairs left out to be rained on. But if you look closely, there is a black chair cushion on top of the brown chair where someone sat presumably recently because we still see the puddle on the ground. One can presume that a smoker sat on the chair to a smoke a cigarette, but no evidence of butts or a butt can. All of these signs point towards a narrative but leave the viewer open to intemperate for themselves. Both of these readings draw elements from a technique called formal analysis.