The Photographer’s Visual Grammar: Visual Rightness and Aesthetics of Artistic Photographs

What is it about?

We are living in a world where photography is everywhere, and almost everyone is a photographer. Yet, some photographs are more visually beautiful, interesting, or right than others. Scientifically, we do not grasp very well what differentiates these ‘good’ photographs, from their less successful alternatives. In this study, we selected high-quality artistic photographs from an artistic photography competition (‘original’), and asked photographers to submit alternative variants from their photographs (‘alternatives’). Since the photographers did not select these alternatives (to submit to the competition), we assume they are less visually right than the ‘original’. We then presented the ‘original’ photographs and the alternatives to 187 viewers and asked for their preference. The original photograph was preferred significantly more than chance level for the majority of the sets (13 out of 21). Yet, the preference for the original differed greatly between sets (9.63% - 79.68%) and the original photograph was also the most preferred one in ‘only’ 12 out of 21 sets. Preferences were influenced by many layers of photographic information (color, contrast, sharpness, composition, emotional expression, etc.), which were often working together. The most aesthetically powerful photographs reveal a skillful combination of medium, form, and subject matter layers, to produce an optimal visual message.

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