One of the strands in my style of photography in and around poodlewalks is to shift away from the literal and transparent. My name for this shift is abstraction--ie., finding ways to underscore the photograph as surface, as flat; even though there is an optical space within the photograph. This is often filed by photographic educators under 'ways of seeing' that depend on, and are shaped by habit and convention.
An example of the photograph as surface:
On the traditional understanding of photography--representation based on linear perspective that is clear and literal-- the grasses or foliage appear as obstructions to a clear view of the scene. From the perspective of abstraction the shift is away from a concern with illusionistic representational space the image has an equal intensity of pictorial incident across its whole surface. The emphasis is on the two dimensionality of the photograph.
The evenness of pictorial incident look as if it could go on laterally and
vertically indefinitely, the edges being an arbitrary cut on their
surface rather than enclosures for the work, as it in the traditional/naturalistic/perspective approach to photography.
The abstraction approach avoids enclosed or bounded figures by running shapes off the edges. This helps to undercut the illusion of depth within the image.
These are modest works compared to those by Naoya Hatakoeyama