THE MET GETS 'SALON' In 2003, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened "The Dawn of Photography: French Daguerreotypes, 1839-1855," the first image visitors saw -- blown up to 10 feet at the entrance -- was of a perfectly composed interior of a mid-19th-century parlor.
My gut feeling is for The White Ribbon, Michael Haneke's elegant, perfectly composed nightmare of small-town Germany, although the presence of Isabelle Huppert (star of two previous Haneke films) as jury president may spark accusations of favouritism if it does.
A beautiful narrow green valley, mostly flat but with little rolling hillocks, mostly grassy but with perfectly composed patches of brown bushes and small trees, some of them chubby, some spiky and vertical, like the cedars of Tuscany.
So he devised perfectly composed views of the Design Research Center, by Benjamin Thompson, in Cambridge, Mass., and of the John Hancock Center in Chicago, by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, with its crisscrossing girders made to look like ready-made Franz Klines.
Yet they are slightly softened because of the way the paper absorbed the photographic emulsion and because the platinum process emphasizes a luminous middle range of gray tones rather than black-and-white-contrasts. The flowers are shot against blank, gray backgrounds and are cropped so that each perfectly composed arrangement of blossoms, stems and leaves verges on abstraction.
Mapplethorpe is at its best when it shows that even now, while some of the acts may no longer shock, his photos are just as striking as they were 40 years ago; perfectly composed depictions of "dirty" sex are perhaps all the more powerful given the current proliferation of haphazard ones.
Paul Strand's photogravure of New York's Wall Street in 1916 is perfectly composed; a parade of shadow-casting figures create geometric forms on the sidewalk in front of an imposing, impersonal building.
Perfectly composed, a model of hospitality, she asked, "Inside or outside?" By the window, I decided, and she wished me a good meal.
That nothing ever changed for her and that she was always so perfectly composed – that sort of femme fatale would be boring".
In a café near his studio, he reached under the table and pulled out a book of his work, opening it to a page bearing a realist portrait, perfectly composed and executed, of Mège clothed and seated.
