Phlog Photos as
square
Prints.
In the nineteen fifties, in the heyday of the illustrated magazines like Life, reportage photos were either shot with Leicas or with a Rolleiflex. The Rollei had the advantage of producing large 6x6 centimeter negatives, and the pictures were square. With the Leica rectangular photographs were shot on eye level, and the square Rollei shots were made on stomach level.
Both formats required an entirely different approach and produced quite different styles of photographs. The Leica mostly lead to more quickly shot pictures, whereas the pictures from the Rollei could be seen as made with deeply felt introspection, the work of an active navel-gazer.
Photographs carefully composed in the viewfinder of either format in general could not be transformed to the other format, cropped in other proportions. It's quite tricky to compose for a square frame in a non-square camera, if a mask is not used.The photographs below were shot with a Sony 828 or a Contax U4R, with the plan to have them printed as prints with the exact size of 12x12 centimeters, to be framed and shown on a wall. They were shot from the hip, stomach level, with the advantage the camera was not in sight too conspicuously, and above all, that the vanishing point was ideal for the perspective in street photography, in situations with people and non-distorted buildings, bikes and automobiles. Since our natural vision is horizontal, a square cropping gives an extra dimension to the picture, because in the imagination the image tends to continue further than the frame.
