Visiting the "Everything was Moving" exhibition at the Barbican brought back to mind what we mean by abstraction in photography.
Pretty much all the pictures in this exhibition are of real events, real people, real things. Yet even these are abstract in a sense that I will discuss.
In particular the pictures by William Eggleston, primarily faces and places in the south of the United States, while deeply affecting, have no message to give. They are patterns whose beauty the artist has observed and captured and presented to us, more or less without comment.
Take a look at the two images of mine at the top of this article. I would claim they are both abstract. They are both photographs, that (apart from cropping) have not been manipulated. They are presented for the patterns that they show, nothing more.
Yet the first is less commonly described as abstract, because without any comment from me, without even a caption, the image is familiar.
Abstraction lies somewhere between familiarity and pattern. I am trying to find where that is.