Lately I’ve been reflecting quite a bit about the presence of tension in photography. Is it important? Is it possible? When I think of other photographers’ images, images I very much enjoy looking at and finding very appealing, I reach the conclusion, that most of them are built upon harmonious, careful compositions and homogenous textures. Nothing sticks out unpleasantly, everything belongs in its right place. Dramatic, great landscapes or mysterious shadows-and-lights scenes with a lot of tonal contrast do not necessarily carry tension.
In music there are two main means (among others, of course) of creating tension: pause and dissonance.
During a pause the musical discourse is briefly interrupted causing the listeners to think how it will continue. Make it too short, and the listener will perceive agitation and restlessness on the performer’s side. The music will resume before tension had the chance to build. Make it too long, and the tension will give way to sluggishness and hesitation. In both cases the performer looses the listener. Make it just right and the listener will freeze with anticipation and suspense. For obvious reasons, pause as a mean to create tension is difficult to be employed in photography. Music is a temporal art while photography is not.
What about dissonance? In music, a dissonant harmony is cause for irritation and aural discomfort. The mother of all dissonant intervals was called in the past diabolus in musica (“the devil in the music” – in formal theoretical terms it goes by the rather unimpressive name augmented fourth, if you care to know). By definition a dissonant harmony is off-balance and therefore unstable; it also creates a feeling of uncertainty and requires immediate resolution to a more consonant (that is: more pleasant) and thus stable harmony. This is more than just aesthetic custom. Everything in our universe tends toward stability: from particles in an excited state to human feelings, everything aimes to reach a stable, low-level energy. Think of the difference between being in love (and all the crazy things people in love in their excited state of mind do) and loving somebody.
Anything off-balance requires an increased energy consumption to be maintained and no system can sustain that for long. It shouldn’t wonder therefore that arts often produce artefacts that emanate harmony and therefore stability. This goes back to a deeply ingrained necessity of everything that moves in this universe, humans included. Dissonance on the other hand brings tension and tension, creates instability and thus movement and dynamism. Not least, it leads to evolution.
Now, how do you achieve dissonance, and thus tension and dynamism, in a spatial (static) art like photography? And is this even possible? I believe it is. Not through tonal contrast: to me, tonal contrast is a means of achieving mystery or drama, but it rarely generates true tension. Tension and drama are not the same thing. Take, for instance, the image of a breaker. It can be overwhelmingly dramatic to see huge waves artistically frozen at their peak. But you already know what will happen next: the breaker will do what all breakers do: it will break. Tension, on the other hand, comes with uncertainty: you may or may not know how it started to build, but you most likely don’t know what will happen next.
One way of introducing dissonance in landscape photography is by including elements that don’t really belong in the scene—elements that are either out of place or in contradiction with the general scene, prompting the viewer to ask questions about the story behind the image. Unlike in music, tension in photography will not resolve but remain frozen in time, because without the temporal dimension the viewer lacks information about the moments before and after and can only speculate about what happened or what is going to happen.
I would like to dig deeper into this by looking at two photographs—none of which are mine. As I have never considered the importance of tension in photography until recently, it is rather absent from my portfolio, I fear. The image at the beginning of this blog entry is not to be seen as related to the content.
The first image—A Perfect Circle—comes from the American photographer Chris Murray. Despite the title, what first caught my eye was not the circle but the bent birch tree. Its solitary appearance suggests that it doesn’t quite belong in that forest, and its unusually curved form makes me wonder, whether the gravity pull might cause the trunk to snap some day. Maybe the roots are damaged, maybe a smaller bear climbed on it, maybe the tree bent toward the light—whatever the cause, to me that trunk arched into a half‑circle looks full of tension, as if the tree did not grow that way of its own accord. What makes Chris’s photograph so special to me is that it works on two levels of meaning: the tension of the unnaturally bent tree is real; the stability of the circle is imaginary and metaphorical.
The second image—Beer Fence, Alabama Hills—comes from Chuck Kimmerle; unfortunately, I no longer find it on his website but only on his Instagram account. It shows a beer bottle perched on a slightly oblique pole of a rather derelict fence in the middle of an arid landscape. What I generally appreciate in Chuck Kimmerle’s photography is the meaningful way he introduces human presence into his landscapes. This is rare, because almost all nature photographers (myself included) go to great lengths to ignore or consciously remove any trace of human activity from their images.
In this particular case, what brings tension into the image for me is the empty bottle (at least I think it’s empty). Perched on that pole in precarious balance, it is clear that it will not stay there for long. And its presence makes me wonder: why was it placed there in the first place? As a target for shooting practice? So it wouldn’t be forgotten when the person who put it there went home? Is it just one more proof of human negligence? Maybe the photographer placed it there intentionally to create tension? I don’t know. But its presence—alien as it is in that scene—makes me wonder why it is there and what will happen to it.
This being said, I think that achieving tension in photography is—by the very nature of the medium—a difficult task, yet still worth watching for when out in the field. Tension can overlap with drama, dynamism, and mystery, but it doesn’t necessarily have to. The images I described above are not dramatic at all; they are quite the opposite. And while we all strive for stability and harmony—in our lives just as in the arts—it is tension that brings dynamism and evolution and thus builds a narrative. Too much of it makes things strenuous and exhausting. Its absence, on the other hand, is deadly. There is no life in a static universe.
