“Interrogation of the Zodiac Killer” -The Ghost of Sandro Botticelli ca 2015
So I slapped some mathematics on this picture and…
The red lines divide the picture into thirds. They also mostly coincide with the doorway (and Cruz’s right hand), framing him nicely as the Main Character of this picture.
The green line was placed using the golden ratio (the ratio between parts of the picture above it and below it is close enough to 1:1.618). It also goes right under his chin (and through some reporters’ hands or tools).
The purple lines are diagonals that are framing the reporters really nicely.
I’m pretty sure you could also do something clever with a circle and the yellow doorway behind him, but I don’t have the patience to fiddle with that.
Basically, this picture has the same “maths are beautiful” aesthetic as (some well-known) Renaissance paintings.
THIS IS ALSO ART
Here’s the thing though, do people GENUINELY THINK this kind of shit happens by accident? Do people truly think photographs are just dispassionate captures of reality? No fucking shit this photograph is framed in accordance with a bunch of artistic principles. Photographers fucking take fucking art classes.
Nowhere in all the reblogs of this viral photo have I ever seen the photographer’s name, but somebody took this picture exactly like this for exactly that effect, and they knew what they were doing, they probably had at a bare minimum $1500 worth of equipment [it’s too lo-rez to tell what kind of rig it is, but I can guarantee you it’s expensive; look at the distortion of the people at the edges of the frame: that’s an extreme wide-angle lens, which is an expensive specialty piece of equipment), they’d probably set up that shot hours beforehand knowing where Cruz would be standing, they’d probably jostled in line to get to that spot to set up to take that shot framed like that, and they’d absolutely calibrated their light meters to make him very dark with a halo behind him.
THIS IS NOT ACCIDENTAL ART. AN ARTIST MADE THIS. NO FUCKING SHIT.
Most of your photo editing software has rule-of-thirds grids right on it. Sometimes the viewfinder of the fucking camera has rule-of-thirds grids on it. We fucking KNOW about the rule of thirds, okay? We look at the world through viewfinders with rule-of-thirds grids on them. Sometimes we forget to look at the world in any other way.
Photographers are not machines. This shit is not accidental or coincidental. Digital does not mean automatic.
Photographs are not dispassionate automatic captures of reality.
Someone made this picture like that, and y’all motherfuckers erased his or her name and acted like this is somehow just something that happened.
