The Sleeping Bag Effect

The best part of a well-executed photograph is that you initially don’t notice the technical aspects and can fully immerse yourself in the graces and nuances present within the work. I was looking around in a magazine and checked the photo credit for an amazingly well-balanced picture of Helen Mirren. The photographer was Dan Winters, so I found his website and looked around. His work— along with being technically flawless and succinct in execution—is creative and organic. The pictures do not rely upon the sugar high of flashy lighting and colors to make their points, and his palette is muted yet bright in the proper places.

While many of his portraits utilize what Nick Nixon calls the ‘sleeping bag’ effect—when a person placed in the center of a vertical frame is surrounded on three sides by little other than a nondescript background—in Winters’ work it is effective, for each photo has a different aspect to the sleeping bag part of the picture. The first picture under the Portraits category is a simple side headshot of Natalie Portman, her face lit softly and evenly. The sleeping bag part starts off at the bottom as a clean white background and seeps up through a gradient, fading into a green/gray at the top.

In addition to simply effective portraits, Winters also produces whimsical photo illustrations for magazines. His ‘Illustrations For A Story On The Commercialization Of Wilderness Areas’, Outside Magazine, contains elements such as a single green leaf sealed in a retro-looking package, complete with a snappy 1960s font and text (‘LEAF: From a Real Tree?’) and a graphic red and white outline of the US, with a similar font reading ‘All-American’.

Both of these pictures combine technical excellence with a talent for noticing, linking, and delineating the connections between people, places, things, and ideas—a skill which all good photographers possess. By putting the thought into his pictures beforehand, scrutinizing all of the picky details and constructing everything within his frame just so, Winters allows us to forget about the technical details and focus only on the irony of a plastic-encased leaf or the curious intersection of Portman’s downward glance combined with a light to dark fade running in the opposite direction of her glance.

http://www.danwinters.com

posted by Megan Bigelow @ 9:58 AM