Gestalt principles of human perception explain how our brain sees patterns, structure, form, and logic in the world around us. Painters like Vermeer, Bouguereau, and Jacques-Louis David used these principles long before they were formalized at the beginning of the 20th century. They used these principles intuitively to make their work more dynamic and to achieve coherence in their compositions, just as photographers like Cartier-Bresson and Alex Webb did later on.

During this course, we will look at principles like figure-ground relation, proximity, and closure, and examine how we can apply these to our own photographs. Although we will be analyzing a lot of work from painters and photographers, this is mainly a practical course. Weekly photography exercises, accompanied by detailed analysis of your pictures, will help you see these principles at work in real-life scenes and apply them to your own compositions.