Photography Squared
Square format photography has a special appeal to me. Despite the fact that most cameras (and films) that I’ve used over my entire life as photographer did not produce square photos, there are images and motifs that are better captured in a square format. Even for serials, many times the square format of individual pictures works much better.
So - back to where it all started (again, I know). The only camera I knew as a kid was a Kodak Instamatic camera, and it produced square pictures on 126-type film. Those pictures presented in albums were around in our house, all the time. It was great to sit in the living room with my grandmother, mother or some friends of the family to look at those pictures and reminisce over them.
Now, it is one thing to shoot square format because that is what your camera produces, and another to re-format pictures to a square only after you shot them. While the first presents some limitations and challenges of its own, especially in terms of composition and framing, the latter sometimes results in odd pictures that do not look great, especially if you take a part of the picture that was not in the center originally, as then you will sometimes encounter odd distortions.
One of the reasons I am writing this post is that I’ve recently got back into medium format film photography. While I had two medium format cameras on my shelf, none was tickling my creativity. For one, my Agfa Isolette II that I had bought in some thrift store for cheap ages ago has stopped working. It may be possible to get it repaired, though, and if I find the time to drive to Kameraservice Ostkreuz in Berlin at some point, I will get it done. The other medium format camera that I own and presume is in working order is a Lomo Lubitel 166b that I bought for cheap back when I was a student. I’ve hardly used it back then as the image quality it produces is really hit and miss. At some point, I did own a Seagull 6x6 twin-lens reflex, but that one is long gone.
During my student days, I often wandered around the streets of Berlin-Charlottenburg, where I lived, window shopping at some camera stores and pawn shops that sold used cameras. Back then, I did fancy a certain Japanese camera that seemed to be a good value for money, but I still couldn’t afford it - the YashicaMat twin-reflex camera in its various iterations. I couldn’t even think of all the Rolleiflexes, Mamiyas, or Hasselblads. As all those were out of my price range, I ended up with a Seagull TLR. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 (and even before) I was wondering if I could get hold of a decent Pentacon Six camera and one or two lenses, but that turned out to be impossible or too much hassle. Long story short, I recently found a YashicaMat 124G in really good shape on Ebay and bought it.
Now let us go back to the square format and why it is so different. Well, why it was so different - until Instagram came along, that is. Instagram did, in my view, revive the square format big time, and it did well. When Instagram arrived, the image world was dominated by all sorts of formats, mostly, however, 3:2 and 4:3, either in the landscape or portrait mode. Only at a later stage Instagram opened up for more traditional formats.
By the time Instagram arrived, the market for analog cameras was pretty dead. Major camera manufacturers like Minolta had sold their businesses, manufacturers of square film format cameras like Rollei, Yashica or Zenza Bronica had closed their doors.
But at the same time, over the past 50-60 years professional photographers and amateurs alike had produced a large amount of square photos, both based on old 126 film cassette format for the low-cost consumer cameras and the 127, 120 and 220 medium format, a trove that younger generations could look into and learn from. And of course, with the square pictures on (vinyl) albums and music CDs, the whole format was on the forefront of popular culture.
It would certainly be interesting if the old masters in painting, drawing and printing, from, say, the renaissance onwards were inclined towards the square format at all. After all, most paintings that I have in my mind are not square, or at least not really. Also, the vast majority of books are not square. That does not, however, mean that the square format was completely absent. After all, the Golden Ratio has been known since the days of Pythagoras and Euclid, and that Golden Ratio has a relation to the square format - like in a golden rectangle.
The big question is - what makes it more difficult to compose a decent square photo?
While I can‘t put my finger on it, at least for myself I find it more difficult to place a subject in the square image frame. On other formats, you often have lines in your finder dividing the frame into thirds or fifths. But the way how many 6x6 cameras work, their viewfinder seems to be the main issue - you look down on a screen, sometimes through a loupe, and while you see the picture upright, it is still mirrored. This means that your picture moves from left to right while the camera moves into the opposite direction. This takes quite some time to get used to and is probably the most annoying part and a reason why for the higher end cameras prism finders are available that turn the camera into an SLR similar to a 35mm camera.
The other I issue found with the waist-level is the levelling of the image - difficult enough sometimes with a digital camera or any camera with an eye-level viewfinder. But when you have balance three axes, one of which moves into a different direction, things are different. The photo of the power plant above is a point in case. Despite
So, composing a proper frame on a 6x6 with a waist-level viewfinder has some technical background. But composing a square shot also has another challenge.
While rectangles with one side longer than the other have an inherent tension, often based on a golden ratio or the rule of thirds, and lend themselves to more dynamic compositions, squares have identical sides. They take away, to a certain extent, the tension caused by different lengths, rendering the image frame less dynamically. So the focus is much more on the content of the image, and, by extension, the dynamics of the content.
And here is where the square format’s real strength actually lies. By taking away the focus from the external format, it lends itself as an ideal format for portrait photography. Of course, there will be always some wiggle room, but still. Either as close-up headshot, or as portrait of a sitting model.
But yes, you can of course use a square format for any close-ups, any macro shot, even landscapes, and everything else.
