On Reduction, Perception and the Question of When Less Becomes More
How much can I leave out of an image before it loses what made me look at it in the first place? I return to that question in my painting, and recently found myself asking it with a camera in my hand. A few posts in the water, some reeds, an old chair: ordinary things can make the question surprisingly difficult.
While revisiting older blog articles, I noticed that I had sometimes called my own work minimalist. The word is convenient, but it can also mislead. I am less concerned with belonging to an art movement than with what happens to an image when apparently unnecessary things disappear.
Perhaps reduction comes closer to what I mean. Fewer elements do not automatically make a stronger work. The remaining forms have to carry more: a sense of space, a rhythm, an unresolved tension. Otherwise, I have merely made the image poorer.
For this experiment, I turn to photography. It lets me follow the process in small steps, from a recognisable landscape towards something that begins to resemble a drawing.
Most of these photographs were taken during a late-summer day trip to Lake Neusiedl in eastern Austria. The flat landscape, the reeds and the traces of the hot summer offered little in the way of spectacle. That sparseness made it a good place to look more closely.
A Starting Point
The following photograph is about two years older. It was one of the reasons I began to pay more attention to reduction in photography.
It is simply a detail of an old wooden wall. Yet the arrangement of its surfaces reminds me of a work of Concrete Art. Rectangles, proportions, different textures and restrained colours form a composition that could just as easily have been created deliberately.
Presumably, nobody intended it as art.
The camera did not create those surfaces, but the frame brought them into a relationship. That is what interests me here: a photograph can become a way of thinking about painting, even when its subject is an unremarkable piece of wood.
Which Minimalism?
A brief distinction may help. Minimalism in the art of the 1960s often rejected the personal, expressive gestures associated with Abstract Expressionism. Repetition, simple forms and the physical presence of the object became central concerns.
My own interest in reduction does not require me to give up the personal or the irregular. A trace of hesitation, an uneven edge or an unexpected interval may be exactly what keeps an image alive.
There are affinities, certainly. But a resemblance is not the same as an allegiance.
For me, the question is what each element contributes. Does it deepen the image, or is it an attractive effect concealing the absence of something more substantial?
A few dark posts, water and light. There is not much else to see.
Yet the different distances between the posts, the light and the reflections determine the composition. The posts do not form a perfect geometric order, and the water constantly changes their appearance.
The interesting question, then, is not so much whether a photograph belongs to a particular artistic category, but what happens when we continue to remove things.
I have approached this question in Gaining by Letting Go and Essence in Art. In Light as State of Being, light takes on some of the work that omitted detail would otherwise do. Here, with the photographs, it is often an interval, a reflection or the relationship between dark wood and pale water.
Removing something is not merely a technical operation. It changes the relationships between the things that remain.
If we take something away, the image should not simply become poorer. The loss must be compensated for by something else: tension, rhythm, empty space or a stronger relationship between the remaining forms.
Simply showing less is not enough.
A Jetty, Some Reeds and a Few Steps
Let us begin with an ordinary scene at Lake Neusiedl.
A jetty extends into the picture from the right, with a band of reeds behind it. Between them lies a quiet stretch of water.
The composition is simple, but several relationships are already present: between the horizontal jetty and the vertical reeds, between the solid structure and the moving water, and between open and enclosed areas.
We could try cropping the photograph more tightly afterwards. Instead, let us walk a few steps further.
Much has disappeared: the jetty, large parts of the water, the sky and a considerable section of the reeds.
Do we now have less?
Not necessarily. The upright timbers now form a compact screen, with reeds gathering along its right edge. Weathered wood and living stems are close enough to be compared: one has been arranged, the other has grown. The water below gives both room to breathe.
The timber holds the eye; the irregular reeds lead it outwards. I am reminded of yin and yang as a relationship between different forces, rather than a label to attach to one side or the other. The photograph needs both the compact form and the less settled edge.
Nothing in the landscape has changed. Only our viewpoint is different.
A Brief Excursion into Music
The posts in the water remind me of Steve Reich’s use of repeated musical patterns.
In some of Reich’s music, repetition makes small changes audible. As patterns move in relation to one another, what first seemed stable becomes an unfolding process. Listening is part of the experience: attention finds differences within apparent sameness.
Something similar happens with our wooden posts.
The posts resemble one another, but no two are exactly alike. They stand at different distances, have different heights and produce different reflections. The water adds further small variations.
Repetition creates a rhythm. The eye moves from one post to the next, pauses briefly and continues.
And what if we reduce things a little further?
A passing boat and a slight change of viewpoint help us reduce the composition to three posts.
Now the differences become even more apparent. Through their heights, distances and reflections, the three posts form a small group that works without much surrounding detail.
Reduction in Several Steps
With the next group, we can take the experiment a little further.
Again, we are looking at posts in the water, this time constructions made of inclined wooden beams forming roughly triangular shapes.
The repetition of the forms makes the scene interesting. However, there is still quite a lot of surrounding space. The eye can move between the individual groups.
A few posts further along, we find an arrangement that concentrates more strongly on the essentials.
Here, the spaces between the beams become as noticeable as the wood. The three dark structures enclose pale openings, while their reflections loosen the geometry below. The picture is held together by what is solid and what remains open.
This brings me back to my experience of Chinese painting, where I learned to attend to unpainted space as part of the composition. In this photograph, too, the open areas have a shape and a rhythm of their own.
Let us isolate one of these structures. Before changing its contrast, the closer view still gives us the grain of the wood, the light along its edges and the small movements of the water.
Two inclined beams meet above the water. Their worn surfaces make them unmistakably physical, yet the shape is already simple enough to suggest a sign.
Now I increase the contrast and suppress much of the grey. The same pair of beams becomes darker and more emphatic; the water begins to lose its descriptive detail.
Of course, this is no longer a neutral representation of reality. But that was never the purpose of the experiment.
Let us go one step further.
In the final version, much of the solid dark mass has also gone. Pale surfaces interrupt the beams, leaving broken edges, narrow dark marks and fragments of reflection.
The result feels closer to a graphic work than to a record of wooden supports in a lake. It makes me think of the way a brushstroke can suggest weight without describing every part of a form.
But this is also where I begin to hesitate. Have I gained a more concentrated image, or exchanged the particular life of the wood and water for a pleasing graphic effect? The answer is not settled simply because the result is more abstract.
For me, some tension survives in those interrupted edges and the unequal reflections. Another viewer may prefer the earlier photograph. That disagreement is part of the experiment.
This is the border I am trying to approach: the point where reduction still concentrates the experience, just before it begins to empty it out.
A Chair That Hardly Deserves Attention
After all these changes in contrast, grey tones and framing, let us return to a simple snapshot.
An old chair stands in front of a farmhouse wall. Above it is a small dark opening, and sunlight casts a shadow across the wall.
The photograph has not been transformed into an abstract composition afterwards.
Most visitors probably pass this chair without paying much attention to it. The surroundings offer old wine cellars, reed-thatched farmhouses and other subjects that seem more interesting at first glance.
Yet the plain wall, the shadow, the small opening and the old wood together form a composition that invites a longer look.
Here the reduction happened mainly through framing and attention. The chair has kept its ordinary character. It does not need to become an abstract sign to hold the image together.
A Late Addition
During another day trip, I took one more photograph that fits this series.
It shows an old coal chute in a wall. As part of the building, it is hardly remarkable. It served a practical purpose, and nobody installed it there to create a work of art.
Viewed as an isolated detail, however, interesting relationships emerge between the dark rectangle, the pale plaster, the rust marks and the irregularities of the surface.
Again, choosing a particular section was enough.
A Question of Perception
The wooden posts in Lake Neusiedl were placed according to practical requirements, not aesthetic ones. The compositions we recognise in them were probably never intended.
Nearby stands a lighthouse that visitors frequently photograph. The inconspicuous wooden posts, by contrast, attract little attention.
They acquire meaning through the eyes of the viewer.
Perhaps this is where these photographs return to painting. Leaving something out is only the beginning. What remains must invite the eye to stay, and offer it something worth staying for.
I cannot draw a fixed border around that point. I can only approach it through variations, look again, and sometimes take a step back. The question is not how little I can show, but how much that little can still contain.
Related articles: Meditation of the Zen Master I Meditations on a Single Note I Zen Paintings: The Art of Emptiness
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