Triptych
pronounced 'trip-tik' - noun- A picture or relief carving on three panels, typically hinged together side by side and used as an altarpiece. A set of three associated artistic, literary, or musical works intended to be appreciated together.
The first triptychs were from early Christian art, which were a popular format for altar paintings from the Middle Ages onwards. Today triptych art is still defined as a work of art, usually panel paintings, digital art or photography divided into three sections.
In photography
Modern photographic triptych
A photographic triptych is a common style used in modern artwork. The photographs are usually arranged with a plain border between them. The work may consist of separate images that are variants on a theme, or may be one larger image split into three.
Patrick Joust
Photographer Patrick Joust spends a great deal of time on the streets of his native Baltimore, drawn to capture both the city's residents during the day and the lamp-lit solitude at night. He does all of this on film.
"It's the medium that works best for the kind of work I want to do," says Joust, who often lugs three cameras around the streets, loaded with different kinds of film.
"These old cameras can disarm people and can be the starting point for some great portraits. There's something more friendly about film cameras, even quaint, and I try and make that work for me."
Joust's refusal to move to digital might seem seriously out of step, given that the vast majority of images are now taken on a digital sensor.
David Hilliard
David Hilliard’s vibrant, multipanel images find a delicate and unique balance between fact and fiction. Combining frames from his four-by-five view camera shot at different times, Hilliard creates composite panoramic images that are seemingly fluid, but instead form a narrative that shifts between time and place. These escapist photographs focus on the ideas of masculinity, identity, and personal relationships through a cinematic style of portraiture.
Dawoud Bey
Since the 1970s, Dawoud Bey has been making photographs of people within marginalized communities, elevating their representation with an empathetic, honest gaze. From his early 35mm photographs of Harlem in the 1970s, to Class Pictures, a five-year series of formal large scale color portraits and texts traversing high school students across the United States, and most recently, The Birmingham Project and Harlem Redux, Bey has created a resonant representation of his subjects, breaking the stereotypes often distilled by much of the mainstream media.
Bey is interested in the portrait as a site of psychological and emotional engagement between the photographer and his model. The multiple panels of Bey's signature style, evident in this 1993 Polaroid triptych, allow him to capture momentary changes in expression, fleeting gestures, and the subtle articulations of personality.
Triptych Assignment
- Make 50 digital images.
- Use manual settings to control aperture and selective focus.
- Think outside the frame. What parts of each image will carry into the next?
- Experience the communicative power photographs have when they are placed side by side and “speak” to each other.
- Consider theme, story or message.
- Use Photoshop to edit your images, and to combine them into one document - 19"x13" @300ppi.
- Seek inspiration from books, magazines, comic books, advertising and the internet and other sources on ways of constructing a triptych.