Curves and counter-curves

Sometimes it is the curves of photographs that interact across thousands of kilometers, like the flapping of a butterfly’s wings generating a wave that propagates to the ends of the earth according to quantum mechanics. There is a dynamic inherent in the curve and counter-curve that is perhaps the least explored aspect of framing technique in a photographic culture dominated by the rational ordered composition of straight lines.
If our Western gaze is calibrated by perspective and its elongated movement of the vanishing line stretched towards infinity where it plunges, the curve and counter-curve guide the gaze inward. They help to offset this aspiration by a cultural shift. Related to the circle and rotation, they represent preservation and unification, inviting concentration, introspection, and meditation. They contribute to counterbalancing a mindset of control and conquest, of externalization and dispersion whose framing is a mirror, whose exclusive position is detrimental to the spirit, thought, human existence, and its future. “We do not love everything that makes us lose our reason; we love everything that reason makes us lose,” André Breton.