El Seven

My twin grandsons are in junior high this year, attending the same school I did in the early 1960s. When one asked if I remembered Mr. So-and-So, a current teacher, I explained that I was born well before most of the school’s staff (math is never an easy subject). On the positive side, the boys evidently don’t think I look that old, not yet.

When I was a student there the Yankees were in the World Series every year (all the games played in the daytime), communism was threatening the free world, and my parents bought their first color TV. Coincidentally, the term square was undergoing a subtle transformation, from strong and clean to a wholly different meaning—one most of us were desperate to avoid.

The slang for this was “L-7” (when you held your thumbs and first fingers just so you didn’t have to say it aloud) and if you fell into that group of losers you didn’t get it or, worse, were totally out of it. When Sam the Sham and The Pharaohs sang “Let’s not be L7, come and learn to dance” we didn’t need a reminder of our social status.

By high school I wasn’t giving squares a second thought, except in geometry class. When my family went on vacation one summer I shot my first real pictures with a box camera, and those colorful squares that came back from the photo lab would have been magical in any shape.

And then, a couple of years after I graduated, rectangles entered my life.

SLRs were increasingly popular in the ‘70s, led by the Pentax Spotmatic and Minolta’s SRT series. The 35mm format, with its 2:3 ratio, became the de facto standard. Here was a completely different space to fill with something interesting. After I purchased one of the SRTs, visualizing anything as a square picture was out of the question.

But I did try. Shortly before Huey Lewis & The News released the song Hip To Be Square I picked up a Mamiya twin-lens camera—I’d fallen for the notion that medium format was somehow better than 35mm. I was back to Square One, literally.

I shot mostly black-and-white with that camera—it was cheap (I did the developing) and somehow seemed more artful. I didn’t take it out often—it was, for me, awkward-handling. When I did, though, my pace slowed (that’s never been fast, as most anyone will tell you), a tripod was mandatory and I thought I spent extra time considering each photo through the viewfinder.

I’d like to remember it that way, but honestly—my eyes were still searching out  rectangles. After I sold the Mamiya my next diversions into larger formats came in the shapes of a Pentax 6x7 and, finally, a 4x5 field camera. I abandoned both when I realized I was happiest—and did my best work—inside a 35mm frame.

Today, it’s still my favorite space, but digital photography has caused me to reconsider square images. Resizing with photo editing software takes only seconds, so square is always an option, whether conceived beforehand or cropped later on. I believe there are interesting square compositions hidden inside most of our rectangular framings.

So, the next time you’re agonizing over a rectangle that isn’t working, do what I do—select the crop tool and discover how L7 can transform your work.