Framing the Picture

The original picture by Goossens (left) has a gloomy ambiance, reinforced by the colors and the composition.  The rhythm is very distinct: one large beat formed by the house, followed by a small beat created by the man in the foreground.  These two main beats are punctuated by the tiny beats of the cityscape in the background.  This rhythm creates a subtext that makes the man look weaker because he is dwarfed by the floating mansion and he comes after it when the viewer looks from left to right.  He is also grounded, while both the hawk and the house are in the air, perhaps suggesting a limitation of sorts.  The

The reframed picture (right) has a completely different rhythm.  In the foreground, the hawk and the man create a smaller and then a larger beat, and the cityscape is larger in scale, giving each building more weight in the overall rhythm.  The man looks significantly more powerful because he is the largest part of the composition in this frame.  Now he towers over the city and seems to be approaching it with determination instead of fleeing toward it.  Because he is the largest thing in the foreground, the man’s line of sight toward the city communicates power and determination instead of fear and shame as in the original.  The darkest parts of the sky are cropped out also, which gives the picture a brighter feel.   Removing the house also changes the space in the picture from feeling very deep to feeling more flat because it acted as a contrast to the buildings in the distance, indicating their relative distance.  Without that reference, the buildings look closer and the space seems smaller and more flat (not completely flat).

I chose to reframe the picture this way to give more emphasis to the man and to make him seem more mysterious instead of insignificant.  I think Goossens framed the original the way he did in order to portray the journey of the man that is bigger than him.  Placing him between a large house and a distant cityscape that are connected by long vertical lines on the ground gives this feeling.  The gloom in the sky also makes the journey seem difficult and monotonous, whereas it seems less so in the reframed version because the darker parts of the sky are out of the frame.  It's amazing how many different compositions can be taken from the same image.