Untitled (River, Hong Kong or Macau, China)

From the Cleveland Museum of Art record

A young art form, photography had not yet fully developed its own visual traditions when William Pryor Floyd was working, so he often borrowed compositional formats from classical landscape painting. Here, he instead daringly placed the stream right in the middle of this composition. It wends its way in gentle S curves into the distance, drawing the viewer’s eye up and across the picture plane, until it disappears into distant trees. A photographer’s choice of viewpoint and framing can radically change how we see a landscape.