Uuglypher Loc: South Dakota (East River)

The adage re: direction of reading...

In another Section the adage asserting that in Western Cultures, in which writing is from left-to-right, the tendency to look at - and to compose- art from left-to-right predominates, while the opposite obtains in Eastern Cultures, wherein writing is from right-to-left.
Sounds good, right?
and it is often repeated by folks holding forth on principles of image composition!

I must admit that, having heard this bit of supposed wisdom many years ago, I did, for a while, repeat it as if I knew it to be true.... but is it?

It is claimed that examination of the composition of Eastern art in comparison with composition of Western art will bolster the claim.

So, let's see the evidence.

I've had it in mind for many years when viewing art of cultures representing one or the other orthographic traditions, and must report that I find no objective support for the concept. Certainly, one can point to the occasional "history" or "travel" or "biographic" panoramas in Japanese or Arabic-reading cultures in which the directional trend is right-to-left....but amble twenty feet down the gallery and find another such silk painting demonstrating the opposite. And likewise in Western Art...the consistency, in my opinion born of my pointedly and admittedly skeptical observations on the matter, is as lacking as in Eastern art.

So I'm asking if anyone knows of any broadly based, objective survey of Eastern and Western art that objectively supports the theory that the orthographic trend of one's culture has a direct and demonstrable influence on the laterality of composition of that culture's art.

Without convincing, statistically supportive data, I'm afraid such learned pronouncements, regardles of their ostensibly logical nature, must remain in the realm of "folk knowledge" or "old wives' tales"

Thoughts? Supportive objective evidence to the contrary?

I'm waiting for the slings and arrows.

Dave in SD

ecobin Loc: Paoli, PA

No slings and arrows here - I'm in total agreement. The real question in my mind is whether a truly good artist composes in any direction. My father was a professional photographer and did many oil paintings - he started with a sketch and then roughly painted the background before anything else. He wouldn't finish a detail before going to the next, instead he'd finish a layer (for lack of a better term) and then back to each item several times until he got what he wanted. I don't believe he painted directionally.

Graham Smith Loc: Cambridgeshire UK

No slings or arrows from me. Left to right, right to left has never affected my consideration of a picture. Some will say they think an image would be better if it was flipped, for instance an animal picture would look better if the creature faced the way we read, left to right. If that were the case every animal would be looking the same way in every picture, that doesn't make sense :-)

G Brown Loc: Sunny Bognor Regis West Sussex UK

Art History has many rules in addition to placement. These will change from culture to culture. Arabic religeon broadly negates iconography but allows word art. In Chinese art brush 'strokes' are important as well as artistic depiction. Japanese and Chinese charachters are similar but mean different things when read. Australian Art is often much more 'child-like' in depiction compared to European but draws much more from aboriginal art rules.

The idea of reading 'backwards' was a sugestion to correct spellings when I was at school as it made you study each word rather than speed read. Equally, looking at european art one would 'scan' Left to Right, but it may be advantageous to 'look' Right to Left in order to truly check ones understanding of all of the artistic messages.

I find that US photography is much brighter than UK photography. I questioned if there was a cultural difference in the use of 'standard photographic levels'. The feedback didn't really come down on any one side.

It may be that so called 'Art Critics' have come up with yet another consideration that shows their superiority of understanding from the rest of the plebs.

St3v3M Loc: 35,000 feet

Imagine your favorite image in reverse.

From http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6a/Mona_Lisa.jpg

mechengvic Loc: SoCalo

Honestly?

I think it would be a good exercise to practice composing left to right... and right to left, and top to bottom, and....

If for no other reason than to actually have to concentrate on composure.

Now that you bring this purported phenomena to our attention, we will no doubt look for it in our work and in that of others. I know I will.

Thanks for giving us something to look for.

Blenheim Orange Loc: Michigan

Interesting topic.

I have often heard that right-handed people prefer light coming from over their left shoulder, and prefer images where the light is coming from over the photographer's left shoulder.

Mike

MtnMan Loc: ID

I agree many such "urban legends" fail on closer examination.

In my case I do feel that I look at images from left to right and bottom to top. I feel that flipping an image sometimes makes it feel better for me. Not always but at least sometimes. And I don't have a clue if it has the same effect for others.

But I know that such beliefs are of no value in testing a hypothesis to see if should qualify as a scientific theory. One has to make the statement in a way that can be falsified and then test it. I know of few such tests of this hypothesis.

Here's a few examples of what we need more of:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24032316

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027826261000182X

http://www.journalofvision.org/content/13/13/2.short

These suggest to me like there might be something to it but deciding what the compositional messages are needs some careful thought.

I suspect there are many more in the psychology and advertising literature.

MtnMan Loc: ID

It is pretty easy to test for yourself by simply flipping images in your software. See whether it affects your preferences.

MtnMan Loc: ID

BTW several of the articles I looked out found a preference for left to right lighting...from both cultures but more so from left to right reading cultures. I Googled images from DaVinci and Rembrandt (the master of Light) and it does seem to me that they use left to right lighting in most of their side lit images.

That one is easy to map to photo composition.

minniev Loc: MIssissippi

I mentioned in the other section that I'd been in a composition class taught by an Israeli photographer (his first language was Hebrew), who had studied this proposition and was of the conviction that the left-to-right thing is a universal rather than dependent on the style of writing. There was a neuro-psychologist in the class who argued that it was totally dependent on the writing orientation.

I've read a bit on the premise and did not find definitive research, only opinions. An interesting related concept: some brain experts believe that art is more akin to math than to writing and note that calculations are often not done in the same directional orientation as writing.

The only research paper I found on it concluded that while many of the compositional rules we hold dear were borne out, this one was about a 55-45 proposition, with the defining factor being whether there was a strong center of interest: if there was, the respondents' eye went to that (whichever side it was on), and then moved around from that point and if there wasn't, about 55% the respondents sort of circled around the frame from the left and the others from the right. The test group was US college students.

I do "flip frames" sometimes, but only rarely do I leave them flipped, they just don't look right. But that may be because I know which way they "really" were.

mechengvic Loc: SoCalo

Good idea.

mechengvic Loc: SoCalo

Might the preference in lighting come from humanity's relationship to the sun? If so, it might be more of a northern to southern hemisphere thing than a reading thing.

lighthouse Loc: No Fixed Abode

Here is what I posted in another recent thread.

dpullum Loc: Tampa Florida

Indeed it does affect how we see; it being how our culture reads. Also there are things like the magic of the number 3 in society. Many old sayings, 3 on a match, 3 little pigs, 3 in religion, body contact- count the pats on the back.

A free book on the psychology of photography:
http://users.rider.edu/~suler/photopsy/article_index.htm