Directing the Eye: Composition Strategies in Art

Imagine you are standing in a gallery in front of two photographs of the same mountain. In the first, the mountain sits dead-centre in a plain white sky. In the second, the mountain is shifted to the right, a winding river leads your eye toward it, and an arch of dark rock frames the scene from above. Both photos show the same mountain — yet one feels alive and the other feels flat. Why? The answer is composition: the deliberate arrangement of everything inside the frame. Before you read on, take thirty seconds to think about a painting, photograph, or film still that you found really striking. What did you notice first? What pulled your eye in?