I have always been drawn to large photographic tableaus with lots of space.
A small motive and large stretches of snow, sea, cloud or rock. A subject of a photograph might be a person, a bird, a whale, a cabin, or simply a line in the landscape. And, the subject may occupy only a tiny part of the frame, while most of the image is given over to what at first appears to be empty space.
For me, that space is often the picture.
There is a strong tendency in photography to move closer, crop tighter and make the subject larger. It is understandable. A large subject is easy to read, especially on a phone or a small screen. But I often find that something is lost when the subject fills too much of the frame. The surrounding landscape disappears, and with it the sense of scale, distance and atmosphere.
A whale photographed up close can be impressive. A whale photographed as a small dark shape in a vast, cold sea can tell a very different story. Photo-identification images, of course, demand the opposite: the whale should fill as much of the frame as possible, with the identifying features clearly visible. But that is science.
The same is true of people in landscapes. A tiny human figure in a vast snowfield may communicate more about the place than a closer portrait ever could. The emptiness around the subject is not wasted space. It creates scale. It can create vulnerabilities, calm, tension or isolation. It tells us something about the relationship between the subject and its surroundings.
This is what is often called negative space, although there is nothing negative about it. The apparently empty part of an image has structure. It determines balance. It gives the eye room to move. It can make a small subject feel more important rather than less important.
A large open area of sky, for instance, can make a mountain seem smaller and more remote. This creates tension, because you know how enormous mountains are. A flat expanse of snow can make a single dark object almost magnetic. A simple line of horizon can divide an image with extraordinary force if everything else has been reduced to the essentials.
I think these kinds of photographs are particularly well suited to large prints.
On a small screen, sparse images can sometimes appear almost too simple. The subject may be tiny, and the surrounding space can seem empty. On a large wall, however, the same image can become immersive. The empty areas begin to breathe. Subtle changes in tone, texture and light become visible. Instead of simply looking at an object, the viewer begins to experience the space around it.
That is one of the reasons I like simple images on a large canvas. They do not need to shout. Their impact comes from proportion and presence.
Modern photography does not always encourage this kind of restraint. Social media and phone screens reward images that communicate immediately. Large subjects, strong colour, obvious contrast and tight crops tend to work well when a photograph is viewed for only a second or two. A minimalist image often asks more from the viewer. It may need time.
The horizon is part of this.
Photographers are often taught where the horizon should be placed: one third from the top, one third from the bottom, rarely through the middle. These rules can be useful, but they can also become habits. The horizon does not always need to be the organising principle of a landscape photograph. Sometimes it can be pushed very high or very low. Sometimes it can almost disappear. Sometimes there does not need to be a visible horizon at all.
What matters is the relationship between the elements in the frame.
Of course, simplicity by itself does not make a photograph interesting. An empty picture can simply be empty. There still has to be something that creates tension or holds the eye: a shape, a change in light, a line, a texture, a small subject, or perhaps just the relationship between two tones.
The difficult part is knowing what to leave out.
Photography is often described as an act of selection. We point the camera at a small part of the world and exclude everything outside the frame. For me, some of the most satisfying photographs take that process a little further. They remove as much as possible without removing what matters.
Sometimes the strongest image is not the one that contains the most information. It is the one that gives the information enough space.
Room to breathe.