It's hip to be square!
By Kristin Mitchell
22 Oct 2009
I was originally set this project as a college assignment, but working on it made me realise how much trimming a bit off the sides of an image changed the way I looked at things.
While I was working on this project, thinking constantly about "squares" made me think about the shape of what I was photographing. I decided to make my project about the little man-made shapes we create around us every day, from basketball hoops to doorbells. I started to see shapes all around me. Whether that was an unconscious or a conscious by-product of the project is open to debate. However as soon as I realised that was what I was concentrating on, I decided to actively, and consciously, pursue creating images of shapes around me.
This is such a simple project, I'd invite anyone to try it. It's a good way of helping to shake up your photography. Every day we're surrounded by the traditional rectangle method of viewing images. Billboards, magazines, cinema, television, and the majority of cameras, all in a rectangle. This method makes people compose their image in a particular way. You use the space appropriately, you might want to make sure you fill the space you've got, getting rid of "dead space". Even the majority of picture frames are rectangles. But make your image a square crop, and everything changes.
There is something about square format which makes it seem slightly exotic to me as a photographer. I associate square format with polaroids, and how they make me think "you had to be there", where a camera was passed around for pleasure, the mixture of the value of the polaroid film and the novelty factor. Square format makes me think of medium format film, of medium format cameras, about looking through a waist-level finder at the subject, of cocking the shutter and carefully focussing the lens with the most minute of movements through the finger tips. It makes me think of something old fashioned and lost, of vintage photography and of a time when photography was something different to what it means today, rather like looking at classic cars and appreciating their design and function and their innovation of the period.
Square format makes me think of a change from the conventional. It's not so out-there that it's completely inaccessible, it's just an alternative method of looking at the world around us.
When I set about this project, I came towards it from a different angle to my usual work. I think it was a combination of the above influences of square format, that made me treat it differently. I went out for a walk and photographed so much more than I usually would, I thought less about careful creation and looked again for the tiny details, spotting pictures around me. Shooting in square format changed my attitude for a moment towards my photography and my way of seeing the world. It generated on-the-go ideas rather than my usual planning, I felt more spontaneous when I went looking for images.
While I was working, I started to notice patterns appearing in the way I was working and I wonder if I hadn't shot in square-format whether I'd have made those observations in my own behaviour.
Sometimes, I think, we just need to change our angle or shape to understand our own perspective a little better.
