Week 2: The Picture Isn’t What You Think

Before the session#

Bring one source image you’re allowed to reframe — a photograph, a piece of found imagery you have the rights to use, a simple digital shape, or a rough drawing of your own. You don’t need four images; you need four different ways of showing one.

Same Picture, Different Truth#

This is the main studio activity. Using your one source image:

• create four different framings of it, changing crop, scale, perspective, orientation, or negative space;
• make each version point the reader toward a different meaning, situation, emphasis, or assumption than the others;
• keep the underlying source the same throughout — only the framing changes.

None of the four needs to be a polished composition. A rough crop on a printed photo, four phone screenshots at different zooms, or four paper masks over one image are all legitimate answers.

Once you have your four, compare them:

• what changed between versions;
• what stayed exactly the same;
• what assumption each framing seems to invite the reader to make.

This Week’s Misbehaviour — Crop It Wrong#

A smaller, separate exercise from Same Picture, Different Truth, done in 15–30 minutes:

• make one crop of an image that feels wrong on first look — awkward, incomplete, or badly framed;
• test whether that “wrong” crop still does something useful: does it hide information, remove the expected subject, leave too much empty space, cut something at an uncomfortable point, or push attention onto something normally ignored?
• write one or two sentences on why the crop feels wrong, and what it makes a reader notice or assume instead.

This is not a fifth framing for Same Picture, Different Truth. It is a quicker, rougher test of the same idea from the opposite direction — starting from “this looks like a mistake” instead of “this looks intentional.”

Afterwards#

Add your four framings and your Crop It Wrong note to your Misbehaviour Toolbox. Week 1 asked you to find the rules a picture book usually keeps invisible. This week you broke one of the most basic ones — that a picture simply shows what is there — by changing how the same source is framed. Next week keeps the picture fixed and starts changing what the words say about it instead.

The spec

What you bring to the session. Written so a reader can tell whether it has been met without asking you.

• you bring one source image you can reframe four different ways
• you have four framings that each suggest something different from one source
• you can say what changed and what stayed the same across them
• you have completed this week's Misbehaviour, Crop It Wrong