Class Blog

A picture of people

This is a collage made by Harry Callahan.  Right off the bat I see, Unity, Variety, Repetition, Balance, and Proportion.  There is a sense of unity in this work that comes from the fact that all of the photos are black and white, and all of the photos are of at least some portion of women’s faces.  There is variety in the sizes of the photos and in the scale of the features in the individual photos.  There is a feeling of repetition simply because there are small black and white photos covering almost the entire work.  I don’t think the same picture is ever used more than once but there are a lot of very similar photos and a lot of photos are used in similar ways.  This is also a unifying feature of the work.  The work is balance.  It has approximate symmetry the top corners seem to be slightly shaded, which makes the middle of the piece stand out a bit.  The clippings in the middle are smaller and more densely placed.  To me this makes the looking at the outer edges much easier than looking at the ring around the center.  As far as proportion there is a wide variety in the relative sizes of the different clippings.  Some of the larger clippings are zoomed in photos of lone features, and some of the smaller clippings are photos of whole faces.  So individual eyes and mouths are larger than entire faces, which is clearly not proportional.