On this bright Sunday morning in early February at the Japanese-style garden within Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park the gate for the wall that surrounds the Zen-style raked dry stone garden presents a square frame for the one boulder that is visible from this standpoint. Imagining the composition cropped to the inside of the frame, thus making visible only the boulder and surrounding gravel, the power of the frame to amplify the viewer’s attention is much reduced. In the same way that a funnel directs the flowing liquid into a narrower passage, so does the frame separate the framed subject from the adjacent context, thus directing the attention of the viewer into a narrower space.
A framing device can come in various ways: a dark border to the central subject, a textured or colored border that separates subject from surrounding milieu, or geometry that stands outside the subject and cuts it off from nearby things. In each case, though, the viewer’s attention is streamlined and sharply focused on the main subject itself. Perhaps, by logic, the reverse visual experience obtains, too: by removing, downplaying, or muting the sense of separation, thus the viewer’s focus on the central subject will also blur and attention can more easily wander to adjacent parts of the scene. In effect, unframing the subject does the opposite to amplifying attention. A subject with framing elements absent now is able to communicate seamlessly with its context; no longer on a pedestal or spotlighted by powerful beam, now it rests on the ground, barely distinguishable from its surroundings.
Perhaps the same visual phenomenon also applies outside the world of optics and principles of composition. When a person, place, or thing is framed, boxed, packaged, or put onto a pedestal, then it stands out; literally, it is outstanding. And the opposite is just as true: taking the subject of conversation, the line of sight, or the artifact in question away from its frame or pedestal, then it loses some of its mystery, lustre, or elevated status. Somehow, it becomes much more ordinary and hardly remarkable from neighboring matters, whether intangible things like ideas and tastes or more physical things like landscapes, workspaces, or locations of recreation and play. Thus, a guest presenter who just stands up from the audience and begins to speak (lacking a framing device) is much less impressive that one who is introduced by someone notable or by a person whose own halo of status glows enough to bathe the featured presenter in reflected glory.
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