We’re all familiar with silhouettes. Do you ever think about why they are interesting? I believe there is a kind of magic of silhouettes.
What silhouettes are
“A silhouette is the image of a person, animal, object or scene represented as a solid shape of a single colour, usually black, with its edges matching the outline of the subject. The interior of a silhouette is featureless, and the silhouette is usually presented on a light background, usually white, or none at all.”
You are familiar with them. You see them often. A featureless black form in a picture. Have you ever thought how something that shows no detail can be interesting?
We know from experience that they happen when a foreground object has a bright light behind it. A simple explanation and they are easy to generate, but that by itself does not explain their impact.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Origin
I love history and finding out how things came to be. I assumed silhouettes have been an artistic technique for centuries. Not exactly. It mainly dates from the 18th century. Cutting portraits out of black paper became a popular and inexpensive art form. It was especially popular for miniatures, small images on lockets and things like that.
You can argue the technique was used by Greeks and others as far back as 7 to 8 centuries BC on some of their pottery. Perhaps it is possible to include some even older cave art. But as far as I could find, there was no name given to it back then and the technique seems to have fallen mostly out of practice until the 18th century.
Here is a piece of nerd interest that will be of absolutely no use to you, but is an intriguing part of our history. The word “silhouette” is not an artistic or technical term. In 1759 Étienne de Silhouette was the French Finance Minister during the Seven Years War. The country’s finances were hard pressed and he had to institute a lot of unpopular austerity measures. So much so that people began to use the term “silhouette” to refer to things done cheaply.
This was the same time period (18th century) when paper cutouts were becoming popular for portraits and the name transferred and stuck. Silhouettes were an inexpensive art form. It fascinates me that no one remembers Étienne de Silhouette, but we use his name all the time without realizing it.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Why are they interesting
But that still leave open the question of why they are interesting. Just being black does not make it interesting. Being featureless would seem to make them less interesting, not more. Why do they catch our interest?
They are somewhat different from what we normally see, but that should not in itself be enough to make them special. There are a lot of “gimmick” techniques that photographers and other artists use to try to catch our interest. Generally these fads do not have staying power and fade out as quickly as they appear.
I believe there is something fundamentally important and intriguing about silhouettes that catches our attention and has lasting power. There seems to be something about them that captures the essence of a subject.
Less is more
Less really is more sometimes. This is particularly true in photography, where our super megapixel sensors capture lots of information and detail. We can confuse our viewers with too much detail. I generally love lots of detail, but the subjective experience we want to present is more important than technical details.
A silhouette is an exercise in simplicity. We remove all information about a subject except its outer form. The way our marvelous brain works, this is usually sufficient for us to recognize the object.
But even though we recognize it, it is presented in a completely different form. With no interior detail we only have its outline. We are left to guess what is in the big, black, featureless area in the middle of it.
And we do. We fill in the blanks. Based on our experience, we “know” what is in that shape. But still, the mystery remains and we perceive it different. We see it in a new way.
It is an exercise in simplicity and minimalization. Absolutely nothing except the information about its shape.
Similar to black & white
In some respects silhouettes are related to black & white photographs. They often are presented in black & white. I believe there is a reason for this beyond just the big black area.
The beauty of black & white is that it removes all color from the image. Color is the most powerful visual sense. We tend to see it first. It can overpower everything else.
But when the color is removed, we more fully perceive the shapes and tonal relationships that are there. The image is transformed into a different art form, giving us an altered way to see it.
Silhouettes are like that, but with an emphasis on just the shape of the isolated black forms. The shapes become the subject of the image. There is generally no tonal range in the silhouetted object, just form.
So, although silhouettes are often made as black & white images, that is not required. It is often preferable to leave the color information in the rest of the image to emphasize the difference of the silhouetted objects and to draw more attention to them.
The featured image
The image featured at the top of this article illustrates some of these points. This was taken in a field on a tiny, nameless back road in northeast Oklahoma. I doubt if I could find it again.
I chose to make both the foreground and mid ground black. Everything that is black is featureless black silhouettes. But there is no problem at all knowing what they are. Adding interior detail would not have improved the image. I could argue that it would have weakened it. It is the exterior shapes we see.
And this is a case where I felt that preserving the color of the background helps set the context and emphasize the shapes of the foreground. I believe the color adds to the mood.
