Application of Gestalt Psychology in Photography

Light pattern projected onto a lady

In photography, the explicit use of gestalt psychology has not been prevalent, even though this field constitutes one of the oldest theories about how we perceive the world around us. Nevertheless, understanding the gestalt principles of perceptual organization has the potential to provide significant insights into mastering photographic composition.

As I explained in an earlier blog post, it was the study of optical illusions that led German scientists Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, and Wolfgang Köhler in the first half of the 20th century to suggest that the structuralist approach prevalent at the time was not sufficient to explain human visual perception. They concluded that we don’t analyze individual elements of a scene and then combine them to make sense of what is there, but we perceive the totality before we become aware of its constituent parts.

Child hiding behind a column
We do not assume that the column has arms and legs

This idea, that the whole is different than the sum of its parts, led to a new field of study called gestalt psychology which opened up the way to understanding the constructivist nature of the brain, making it possible to explain why we perceive a subjective and not an objective reality. Artists, designers, and advertisers soon discovered the importance of the principles that were formulated in the field of gestalt psychology for achieving aesthetically pleasing, minimalist designs that appeal to the subconscious mind.

The Human Perception

Most of us take it for granted that we all are equipped with an extremely powerful information processor – the best that evolution could come up with. The puzzling thing about the brain is though, that it accomplishes the most sophisticated tasks imaginable with a very simple trick: It matches patterns. But the brain is so good at this that it can make sense of incomplete, distorted, and even contradictory sensory information.

Indeed, we owe it to this capability of the brain, to the fact that it will seek and instantly detect structure, form, and organization wherever we direct our attention to, that we don’t perceive a chaotic manifestation of dissociated lines, curves, and shapes when we look around us, but meaningful objects. This allows us to rapidly scan our surroundings for elements that we require to accomplish our objectives without dedicating time and attentional resources to irrelevant or superfluous details.

Dog sitting on the lap of a lady
We might at first assume that the dog has arms and legs

On the other hand, the simplicity of the mechanism that the brain uses to create meaning makes us vulnerable to misconceptions. But the brain seems to subconsciously like looking at scenes where item perception occurs in accordance with the way its pattern matching mechanism works. That’s why gestalt concepts can often inspire and make it easier for us to understand why some visuals appeal to people and others do not.

The Gestalt Principles

Having studied human perceptual organization, gestalt psychologists formulated a number of concepts and principles with the aim to capture its substance. Depending on the field of application, some of these are sometimes omitted or merged together, and sometimes used under different names.

In order to start using the gestalt theory in photography, it is necessary to understand the four concepts: emergence, reification, invariance, and multi-stability and the twelve principles: meaningfulness, conciseness, symmetry, good continuation, closure, figure/ground distinction, grouping by proximity, similarity, common region, connectedness, common fate, and synchrony.

In photography, it is common to study these principles as distinct rules. These should, however, not be thought of as laws, but rather as descriptive notions of how most of us deal with our perceptual experiences.

An apple with one half green the other half red
The asymmetry makes this photograph interesting

The brain’s main aim is to match what it sees to meaningful patterns it has stored in memory. The study of gestalt principles reveals that it attempts to do this by going from simple interpretations to more complex ones. For this purpose, it pursues an unconscious search strategy by following where different cues in the composition lead, supplementing missing information whenever it can. For the rest, it simplifies our visual field by grouping elements in the scene that appear to be related. This fast categorization is a very efficient way of merging perceptual information as we scan our environment based on clues it provides us.

Gestalt in Photography

In photography, the explicit use of gestalt psychology has not been prevalent. This may be due to the difficulty that most photographers, especially those doing mostly street photography, deal with instantaneous occurrences, where there is no time to intentionally arrange a scene as designers or advertisers can do. Nevertheless, understanding the gestalt principles of perceptual organization has the potential to provide significant insights into mastering photographic composition.

But obviously, grasping the theory alone is not sufficient to be able to use it in everyday practice of taking better photographs and the gestalt principles should not limit the artist’s creativity in any way. Every photographer must decide for her/himself which photographic composition rules to observe and how to use them to create the image she/he envisions.

Ghostly image of a girl
Continuity makes this photograph interesting

Nonetheless, understanding human nature makes it possible to use the gestalt principles as tools for taking photographs that are engaging and at the same time appealing to the unconscious. An artist can structure her/his work according to a principle – positive sense – to appeal to specific perceptions, or intentionally go against it – negative sense – to highlight specific elements. Thus, there are three uses of the gestalt principles: An understanding of the human mind can help to choose a pleasing composition; the use in the positive sense can help to organize perception; and the use in the negative sense can help to highlight specific elements.

Conclusion

Gestalt psychology, which, translated from German means psychology of form, is built upon the premise that the whole is different than the sum of its parts and assumes that we perceive whole objects before their constituents and that it is perceptual organization that underlies human perception.

Gestalt psychology can help photographers to use the biases and quirks that characterize human visual processing in order to achieve superior compositions, and thus to structure visual information in a manner that will make it easy for viewers to understand, while also engaging with the aesthetics of it all.

Aischa Erten’s book GESTALT IN PHOTOGRAPHY is an excellent source for learning to apply gestalt psychology in photography. You can buy the book at Amazon.

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