Scene in the Tate Gallery
To crop... or not to crop?
Tonight's weblog has me in two minds... the above photograph of the woman letter writer was taken in one of the side-gallery seating areas of the Tate Gallery in London. My written details on the contact sheet note that I was using a Leica M4/2 fitted with a 2.1cm Schneider Super-Angulon that day... thinking back, in the early 1980s I was using that combination most days!
The shot was made very candidly... I'd been to the opening of the exciting and moving - literally - Jean Tinguely Exhibition, with Shuna, and had tried a number of times to take some slow shutter speed images of the Swiss Kinetic artist's extraordinary mechanical pieces so showing actual motion.
I'd been told a couple of times by the Gallery's security staff not to take photos of the exhibits even though it was a "press day" and there were a few other newspaper photographers there doing just the same. Maybe the staff thought my pair of compact Leica rangefinders with their diminutive lenses were not serious cameras... hey, you've always had to show off a fast long zoom for credibility, right? Nothing changes!
But I did come away with several images of the art works... probably due to the Leica M's near silent shutter. The noise from the other photographers' motor-driven SLRs hadn't been drowned out by the clanking and wheezing of the mechanical art show and some had also received short shrift from the men in uniforms and peaked hats.
After a couple of hours of artistic enjoyment and fun we were on our way towards the exit and I saw a wonderful composition of shapes and contrasts. Seated at an almost pure white round table was a woman writing a letter... she was completely absorbed in her activity and didn't notice me approach, lean on the back of the circular banquette opposite her, quickly focus, frame and fire the shutter just once... before moving on.
What has always bothered me about the image is whether it should be printed full-frame with the artefacts of the film's sprocket holes forming a frame to hold all of the elements together... or whether I should crop the negative to the format of the image at the top of the page. Cropping certainly simplifies the design elements by discarding the distracting left-hand edge of the column left of frame, but it crops into the full oval shape of the round table and blends the almost pure white tone of the table with the similar tone of the print's paper base.
The cropped image also reveals the woman's form to be the focal point which falls neatly into the Rule-of-Third's proportions. And although some of the spatial quality is lost by cropping into the available image, the single vertical line of the column, the line formed by the top of the banquette and the curve of the table edge against the latter leave me favouring the cropped version more... but over the years I have printed them for publication in roughly equal numbers... both full-frame and cropped. After 25 years of printing it I'm still not sure which one I prefer... and other editors seem to use both versions too.
8:56:15 PM 
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