Rabatment and Ruins

It’s all about the balance.

I’d neither learned the techniques people use to frame shots with a “real” camera, nor ever heard of rabatment until now. It is but one way to capture a slice of the world with rectangles-within-rectangles.

Consider all the lines one could draw to carve up the whole of a Plum Beach sunrise space into geometric planes. The cornflower sky becomes slatted air, as if one could reach up and gather sunrise’s starbursts into a morning monture.

Light and air carve off rectangular planes from landscapes of still water and gusting sky.

The above photo was taken on an extraordinary sub-zero Massachusetts morning. It somehow packs in each separate category of cleaving and balance in a landscape: rabatment on the left, where a leafless island tree anchors the composition; sky sheared off at the lower third, where the Merrimack River flows East to the horizon and the Atlantic; and a trick of light and clouds that slices straight down the mid-seam.

And I could not possibly leave the subject of rectangular composition without sharing a bit of rabbatement–tricks of composition by means of color and light and segmented negative space in and around another Rabat. . . .