"Two by three" -- what's with the name?

"To quote out of context is the essence of the photographer's craft." -- John Szarkowski

In his wonderful book The Nature of Photographs, Stephen Shore discusses four formal elements that define photography: vantage point, frame, focus, and time.

In framing an image, a photographer makes complex (if not always conscious) decisions. Whatever is inside the frame is visible in the final image; whatever is excluded remains unknown to the viewer. If the photo is depictive, the choice of frame changes the message of the photo. If it is subjective, it changes the composition.

Not only the location of the frame (the boundary between what is "put in" and "left out") matters, but also the shape of the frame. Square images feel different from rectangular images. The shape of the rectangle matters too. A very wide, narrow perspective creates a different feeling from a nearly-square frame.

The shape of the frame starts with the camera; the design of the camera and film determine the proportions of the photos that are recorded with it (unless they are cropped). In the twentieth century, thirty-five millimeter film cameras became the de facto standard for photography around the world. The proportions used by these cameras were adopted for digital SLRs and continue to shape how we see photography. They became what we think of as the "normal" proportions for a photograph.

Those proportions are the ratio 2:3.

Two by three.