The instanding image

Every now and then, being on both sides of the picture business (as a partner in Evolve, and sometimes as a client), I try and note what photography I personally find useful in a given hour or two. It’s a visual audit, a reality check of sorts on what seems to be working for me.

The results of this can give insight on what we are doing right here or what we might develop.

Today, for example, it included: a classic archival shot of a building I was reading up about on wikipedia; a well-taken product shot of a jacket in the newspaper; and a misty view across a rainforest. Yes, random. There’s a lot more of that. The trick is to look for the patterns.

These images tend to be anything  but outstanding. But they really function – they are embedded in the content they deliver in a way that is as important as any verb, noun or comma in the associated text. They absolutely work and do so as part of a structure of communication elements.

This is, for me, an important part of understanding how imagery is developing in our world. It’s becoming an ever richer and more complex language, one that we increasingly read and use better than aspects of our spoken or written language.

When we send or share pictures via social media we often do it with images that are closer to this vernacular than to being an icon image. The images are visual notes, elements in a communication, and with no aspirations to be a framed print or a full-page ad.

We’re all increasingly this kind of photographer. Or reader of photography. And, with the way archives are open to share (legally or not so legally) we mix up the old with the new in a rich stew of visual content.

Some of the images we add to our collections, often some of the ones shot on smartphones, are perhaps in this area. They’re images that straddle a line between the new language ‘element’ and the more iconic shot.

These images need a description – so, for me, I’ve been calling them ‘instanding’ as opposed to outstanding. They’re pictures that are really made to sit inside a message, a component. Some can also work iconically, i.e. Be outstanding. But the main need in communications is to find that great image that can be instanding, can work alongside as a natural team player.

An example, would be something as simple and yet appealing and conceptually charged as Ron Fehling’s image of a coffee cup.

© Ron Fehling/evolveimages.com

It’s a note of a modern phenomenom – the culture of decorated cappuccino froth. It says care, love, taste, style and, of course, service. (Don’t tell me you do this to your own coffee at home.)

It’s instanding. Isn’t it?

blog post submitted by Lewis Blackwell, Chief Creative Officer, Evolve Images