Landscape and portrait

It occurred to me, looking at a print of this:
that many of my more dramatic landscape photographs are taken portrait. On the flip side, we have several prints on the walls of the office which the boss took in North Africa back when he was an anthropological film maker. These include several dramatic portraits which are taken landscape.

Is the drama purely from the non-conventional composition, the shock of the unexpected? How does this apply to other artforms? Has there been too much of a move to break the traditional forms and boundaries without enough exploration of how they can be bent?

I remember a quote a shile back from a film-maker who was reacting against the increasing landscapising of films, which he claimed was being driven by the kinds of films Hollywood produces. (Not as part of any kind of evil empire, just accidentally). This guy made films which had a strong architectural component in their landscapes, for which more portrait perspectives are usually more appropriate in a cluttered place like Europe. It’s interesting to think of vistas over places like, I dunno, Sao Paulo, where the natural landscape perspective for landscapes leads you to very horizontal compositions, a bit Sim-City like, of the extent and number of skyscrapers. A more vertical kind of perspective would perhaps emphasise the height of individual buildings.

I guess the big difference between landscape and portrait in the context of a landscape, for me, is the influence of gravity. In a landscape landscape you see gravity extensively over a dimension (left-right) which typically has little effect on how an object is rendered, and so a number of different and comparable reactions to a constant thing, a whole hillside or forest, or whatever, rolling or climbing, or whatever. Whereas in a portrait landscape you see the influence of a stacking of elements strongly ordered by gravity, and so of different character, giving more of a cake effect. If you drew a tree in portrait, the branches at the top would be different in scale and character to the ones at the bottom owing to their gravitational ordering. Whereas a forest’s trunks of adjacent trees would be equivalent from a gravity perspective, and so liberated from it. I think that’s also why you often get a strong sense of the layering of elements, and similar stratifications, in portraits landscapes (air, earth, water), etc.

The other thing you get, I think, is increased sense of depth in portrait, because of.how sight-lines tend to work (for a certain vertical “dot-pitch”, because you’ve more dots in total between the bottom and the horizon, so you’ve more representable depths).

I guess both of these combine to give portrait landscapes a very particular and singular, but detailed, quality because their elements are not broadly comparable owing to gravity and their rendering at different scales. In a landscape landscape, I think you have more of an opportunity for comparison, and seem to me more general and summarizing, but less particular.

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Landscape and portrait

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