RIOT AS TABLEAU

A formal analysis of Hollie Adams’ photography of the recent violence in Rotherham

Freelance press photographer Hollie Adams captured the action at the August 4th Holiday Inn riot in Rotherham, England, as if on a stage. She set up at a distance, with police and rioters facing off to left and right. The camera was, I surmise, fixed on a tripod, as many of her photos of the event are from the same viewpoint, directed at the same spot. This provided the stability for sharp focus and plenty of detail, and the option of selectively cropping according to where the action occurred.

 

Screen grab from The Independent web site. Adams’ camera is square to the building, trained at a central vanishing point indicated by the perspective of the building and sidewalk (pavement). I’ve added a grey area at right to suggest the full width of the photograph from which the action has been cropped. The full-frame composition conforms to central, single-point perspective, with the participants in profile, remarkably like paintings in the neoclassical “tableau” style of two hundred years ago—which in turn resembled the friezes of Antiquity. The main characteristic of such tableaux is how the protagonists are presented in a shallow plane, seen in profile, creating a dispassionate engagement between spectacle and viewer. The massed, overlapping rank of armed, uniformed figures occurs in Neoclassical paintings such as Jacques-Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii.

 

Sky news site, video link. Much closer than Adams’ set up, with two-point perspective. A quite different sense of reality.

 

Adams has zoomed in, focusing further away, with spectators creating a theatrical effect.

 

Warrior throwing spear.

 

This is the artful cropping of one of Adams’ photos, as made available by Reuters. It’s a “freeze frame,” taken momentarily after the photo at the top of this essay, presumably selected from a stream of motor-drive exposures.

 

The Intervention of the Sabine Women, by Jacques-Louis David, 1799

 

The orthogonal quality of the tableau format, enhanced by the grid of wall blocks, provides a firm foundation to a page layout in the print edition of The Globe and Mail, August 17th, 2024. ●