Subtracting the Universe

Imagine a painter—say, Georgia O’Keeffe—staring into a blank canvas. Working from an image in her mind’s eye, she steps to the canvas and sketches out the basic composition. Then she adds paint, in various colors, tones, layers and blends, building up the composition stroke by stroke. When she decides the image is complete, she stops adding paint to canvas.

Now imagine a 26-year-old Michelangelo, contemplating a massive rectangular block of white marble weighing several tons, from which he has been commissioned to complete a sculpture of David for the city of Florence within two years. Every move he makes will involve carving away, removing unwanted material, in order to extract the form he visualizes as “trapped” inside the raw rock. Once he has removed all the material that isn’t David, his creative work is done.

Though photography and painting on canvas are both two-dimensional art forms that function according to the same fundamental principles of composition and design, I’d argue that most photographers operate rather like subtractive sculptors—like Michelangelo.

The painter’s work is additive, beginning with an idea and a blank canvas and rendering an image with the addition of content. A painter with the skill to do so can draw from the full scope of his or her imagination to render, with the application of paint to canvas, a novel image that emerges entirely from within the artist.

In contrast, rather than a blank canvas, we photographers begin with a