Otto Steinert – “A Pedestrian's Foot”
From
reading “The Photographer’s Eye”, John Szarkowski, I chose the
photograph “A pedestrian walking” , 1951. Steinert was the
founding member of Fotoform, it made photographic experiments and
sought to draw attention to the creative possibilities of photography
which had been extinguished by Nazi cultural policy. They had a
strong emphasis on abstract form derived from patterns found in
nature and from darkroom manipulation.
The
framing and composition of this photograph turns the everyday
objects, tree, footpath, road and a person, into abstract shapes. The
very constructed view adds to this isolation of static forms on the
left of the composition. The incomplete view of the tree and the
road, the hard circle of the iron grate and the heavy concrete
footpath emphasis the static nature of the left hand-side of the
image. The introduction of a pedestrian walking into the frame. I
feel the pedestrian is more disappearing into his environment than
moving through it. The highly polished shoe is left stationary on the
ground rooting the image to the right hand side. For this reason I
feel the pedestrian is struggling to fit into this urban context.
William Spratt-Murphy
