 |
| Hosta 'Snake Eyes' 17 July 2025 |
I believe that asymmetry is a snobbish look at visual reality. Ancient civilizations seemed to be obsessed with its opposite. In most cases so has Detroit. It was the Rambler American that had a touch of asymmetry as its passenger door was larger than the driver’s.
I have written before on the subject. The link is below.
My friends of the American Hosta Society eschew asymmetry and when hosta leaves are entered in leaf shows judges eliminate those that are not symmetrical. That changed (a tad) when Hosta ‘Strip Tease’ was introduced. Check a scan in the above link.
My smaller Hosta ‘Snake Eyes’ may be a sport of Strip Tease.
While I was scanning the leaf and flowers I thought about my large collection (I bought them for reasons not just to have a museum) of cameras and came to understand that the only asymmetrical ones are my Nikons and my Leica III-F. I do not believe that their asymmetry in any way affected their operation.
Now with phone photography taking over the world selfies and portraits usually feature faces that are lit the same on both sides. Rembrandt used what is called Rembrandt Lighting which is the result of painting someone close to a window.
In lighting people with chubby faces you light the side of the face that is further away from the camera. The closest side is darkened. This is called narrow lighting. I have a photographer friend who shoots headshots. A few months ago he told me, "Alex my subjects want me to light both sides of their faces equally as if I were using a phone." So asymmetry is now a past in portraiture.
