Your life is a square

In the past few weeks I've been obsessed by the square format. Some notable artists that I've grown to admire are Norihiro Arikawa (@ekodachrome_portra), Jay Vulture (@vulture_labs), and some guy named Michael (@mikeshoots.film).

Norihiro Arikawa is a Japanese portrait phtotographer who posts a single portrait daily. All his images are in square format and mixing BW and Color. What draws me to his portrait work is his compositions. The usual rules of composition, like the rule of thirds, golden triangles, or the golden ratio, do not seem to apply much in the 1:1 aspect ratio. The square format, is far more simple in that regard, and ironically, works more like a circle it would seem.

When shooting portraiture in a square, the most profound difference I found is that often it goes against the conventional "get closet to your subject" advice. Instead, square photographs often take a step back, and photograph the model in their environment. You can of course come in closer and do a close up portrait, but my attention has been drawn to these full body images. They bring a sense of freshness into my mind. Something I haven't really seen much of before.

Of course you can also get up close as was said before, and the results are equally as good. As usually in photography, variety is never bad. There's value in seeing both a zoomed in and zoomed out view of your subject. If you only have the zoomed in images, the viewer will feel disconnect because they'll lack a story. But if you only provide the wide shot, they can feel disconnected due to the lack of closeness.

Michael shoots a variety of subjects from portraits to still life and landscape. When we think of square formats, we usually only think of simple and centered compositions, but once you start to look a bit deeper, you see a large plethora of compositions. With some images, the composition doesn't follow the rule of thirds, but an circle in the middle of the frame instead, with your eyes going around the image rather than being focused on a certain point in the image.