Frontal Perspective

About

A frontal view faces its subject squarely, with the picture plane parallel to a façade, a face or an object, so that depth collapses, as in an architect's elevation. With no diagonal to follow into space, the effect is calm, formal and often slightly uncanny.

Icons used frontality to give holy figures authority, and Albrecht Dürer painted himself staring straight out in his Self-Portrait of 1500. Photographers adopted the approach for clarity: Eugène Atget recorded Paris shopfronts head-on, and Walker Evans photographed American churches and shopfronts with the same directness in the 1930s. Charles Jones laid garden vegetables before his camera as plain, centred portraits. Candida Höfer photographs symmetrical library and theatre interiors, Markus Brunetti stitches countless exposures into seamless elevations of cathedral façades, and Yves Bélorgey paints modernist housing blocks face on. Look for symmetry and edges parallel to the frame.