Issue 108 | March 18 - 25, 2022

On Capacious Photography

I don’t know, I must have heard it on a podcast or something, but recently I found the five-dollar word “capacious,” which is a fancy way of saying ‘roomy’ or ‘spacious’ echoing around my head like an earworm I can’t get rid of. In an effort to do something useful with this situation, I’ve been thinking about what a capacious photography might be.

When I first started getting more serious about photography, my strategy for making images was the opposite of capacious, it was reductive. I tried to minimize elements in my photographs in the hopes that a reductive approach would increase the clarity of the expression I was trying to achieve. If they were portraits, I tried to find the plainest, most empty walls to serve as a backdrop for the photos. If it was something funny or interesting I saw on the street, I’d put it in the center of the viewfinder and snap a picture so that the sides of the image hold the subject in the frame (I still have this problem). Other times I would make images with the shallowest depth of field my lens had to blur out the rich complicated world that my subject existed in. I wanted to shrink the world to achieve the big hope and dreams I had for my photography.

What I realized as I became more acquainted with photography that really moved me from the greats and my peers, I began to see that their photography was successful because of all the different ways their work would try to make the pictorial space bigger and more elastic and…capacious.

Instead of two-dimensional flat images, these photographers tried to depict a three-dimensional pictorial space by layering elements in the foreground, middle ground, and background of the image. Other photographers would crop their images so that, for example, an arm from someone outside of the picture frame would come, sans body, into the picture frame, or someone inside the frame would be looking, or pointing outside the frame. Tactics like these and others would remind me, as an image viewer, that there was a big world inside and beyond the four sides of the picture frame.

Some images would hold a visual mystery, or make me wonder what, exactly, was going on in the image. These images became more spacious because they really engaged my mind, and raised questions that couldn’t really be answered. By forcing this dilemma, they made my imagination almost a part of the image as I was being encouraged to speculate on what was happening, or imagine a story that could bring meaning to the images I was viewing.

When photos were put together, in series or photobooks, that’s where I really saw a world opening up. In photography series and projects, I began to see that one could really begin to describe a subject in a much fuller way by not only giving me the precise description of individual images but by showing me that images in sequence or juxtaposition produced something more - a sum greater than the parts. To me, a successful photo series or project or book has an almost literary quality in my mind, like reading a short story.

This week’s featured photographer, Sofie Vasquez, is a great example of that. She has done a spectacular job of opening up and expanding the world of indie wrestling she is exploring in her images. She gives us portraits of the protagonists. She shows us the wrestlers in action - all of the glamour, grit, and pain of a wrestling match. She shows us fans. She shows us the wrestlers in dressing rooms, or outside the venues. In this way, and through these photos we feel like we are a fly on the wall in their world, and our imagination is activated as we wonder and want to know more, so much more about the people who are working and hustling to succeed in this world.

There are a lot of forces and incentives in play that encourage us to see the people and world we encounter through a more reductive lens. The reality is that the world, and the people in it are always always always more complex and complicated than we will ever be able to grasp. Starting from that point and trying to make pictures that allow room for as much of that complexity as we can perceive seems like a good way to go. That’s a capacious goal for a capacious photography. And that’s what I’ll aim for in the warmer and brighter months ahead.

Thanks for reading and I’ll see you all next week.

peace and love,

James Prochnik | The NYC Photo Community | Issue 108 | March 18 - March 25

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