De-framing: experiments in seeing interrogates the elements of the visual field as it is experienced by the gaze and configured by the photographic image. Positioned at the centre of the Humilitas project, this series considers the possibility of a humble image, an image that invites attentive viewing, seeking to expand our seeing beyond the frame. This is an open image, one where the subject's presence is loosened or softened in a muddying of foregrounds, midgrounds and backgrounds intended to delay the viewer's concrete reading. In a play of focal planes and limit states of visibility, the imaged subjects stand, diffuse or fall away.

 

De-framing employs the 250 mm f/ 5.6 Hasselblad Sonnar lens model used by Nasa in the pioneering 1968 photographs of the earth rising over the moon. The reason I chose this lens was not so as to bring the subject closer to the eye, but for the play with depth-of-field offered by its optics (4 elements in 3 groups). For example, images # 5 and 6 of the series aim to achieve a pictorial effect that, inspired by Claude Monet's renditions of light as it falls fleetingly on trees and prairies, invites a seeing that approximates an impression. *