A noun waiting for a verb

Last year my son Christopher took a photography class taught by Randy Allen at Sacramento City College. Allen’s not only a great teacher and photographer but also a good friend that goes way back to the days when we both were SCC photo students ourselves. Christopher told me something that Allen said during class that made sense to me in a way that I hadn’t thought before.

He said that some pictures are “a noun waiting for a verb.” Perhaps to some of you that may sound like a grammar problem, but to me it made perfect sense.

The noun would be a scene that, at first glance, may seem perfect. It could be a landscape, a sunset or a street setting, but upon looking at them more closely there is something missing. That would be the verb. For me, that usually means a person, but it also could be a bird flying by or a cow or horse in just the right spot in the frame. This things can give an overall scene a sense of scale or context or even a destination point for the eye to go in the composition. It can also give a bit of sense of something going on rather than just a static picture. It’s that one little thing that can compete the photo’s composition.

This is sometimes called the “fishing technique” because photographers would find a scene then wait for a subject to enter the frame at the right place to complete the composition. Like fishing, both scene and subject could happen right away, almost simultaneously, but more often one has to wait, sometimes for a long time, for everything to fall into place. Sometimes it doesn’t happen at all and you have to give up and come back another time.

One of my favorite photos is by the famous photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, titled “Hyères, France,” taken when he lived in that city in 1932. It’s of a narrow street scene taken from slightly above. A winding staircase is in the foreground and just beyond is the curve of a cobblestone street. Perfectly placed in the upper left corner is a cyclist speeding by. Now you have to remember this was a time before fast motor-driven cameras (which Cartier-Bresson would have probably eschewed anyway) where one had to time their pictures carefully. Any sooner and the cyclist would have been obscured but the stairs railing, any later then he would have been out of the frame. Cartier-Bresson called this the “decisive moment.”

Allen’s “noun waiting for a verb” phrase is just as descriptive. It takes a lot of practice and patience to recognize a scene that needs that “verb” and even more to be able to time it just right.