120 Edges
120 Edges delineate 30 monochromatic photos, and contain thousands of shapes and textures, themes and variations.
In June and July 2024 I made 120 Edges, a series of thirty pictures (four edges each).
5–8 Cortona and 9–12 Cortona, digital photographs, 2024.
Each composition is a 1 x 1 digital photograph, and I shot them that way, framing the subject matter within a square viewfinder instead of cropping the photo afterwards. The edges became decisions marking my deliberate selection from shapes and details available at the moment of capture.
17–20 Cortona and 21–24 Cortona, digital photographs, 2024.
Each picture has a carefully considered monochromatic value structure. Though the intense summer sunlight often created areas of high contrast, I worked to present a deep range of values from black to white. My practice of organizing a full value range around very few areas of pure highlight draws upon Georges Seurat’s intricate studies.
29–32 Cortona and 33–36 Cortona, digital photographs, 2024.
This summer I also decided to make my usual process more portable in order to reduce hesitation and delay. To that end, this is the first photographic series I’ve made entirely using my iPhone. From capturing images in Apple’s RAW digital format to exporting final versions from the iOS version of Adobe Lightroom, I produced 120 Edges with a single piece of technical equipment.
41–44 Cortona and 45–48 Cortona, digital photographs, 2024.
49–52 Cortona, 53–56 Cortona, and 57–60 Cortona, digital photographs, 2024.
I explored similar ideas regarding formal constraints earlier this year in Do I Know My Limits? Once again I found that operating within a few practical rules uncovered incredible arrays of shapes, textures, and values in everyday scenes.
61–64 Cortona, 65–68 Cortona, and 69–72 Cortona, digital photographs, 2024.
73–76 Tiburtina and 77–80 Fiumicino, digital photographs, 2024.
Having established a reliable workflow on my iPhone, I found it very easy to work steadily on 120 Edges during mid-July transatlantic travel.
89–92 Fiumicino and 93–96 Tiburtina, digital photographs, 2024.
As the title implies, 120 Edges’ main visual idea is its formal setup: a lot can happen within a simple square. While I am interested in the subjects inside the squares, and didn’t choose them entirely at random, these thirty photographs ultimately follow the same course I described in What’s the Big Idea?
Big visual ideas can emerge from repeating small practices.
97–100 Cortona and 101–104 Cortona, digital photographs, 2024.
113–116 Cortona and 117–120 Cortona, digital photographs, 2024.