Minimalism Is Not a Genre

It is rather a manner or a modality.

Photo by author.

I’ve always considered minimalism to be a style. My first serious encounter with it was in my student years, when we meticulously studied the works of or . Later, I fell in love with the designs of and his successors at Apple, and finally, with Mark Rothko in painting. Photographic minimalism never really touched me — and I’ll tell you later why — but it wasn’t until recently that I discovered minimalism is not a genre. It is a way of doing things.

Sounds obvious once you think it through, but go around and ask people about it, and most will consider it a genre. It is not. Let me explain.

A couple of weeks ago, I started a photography course for beginners. The first three sessions were dedicated to essentials — mastering exposure and composition — and then I decided that the best way to put this knowledge into practice was to assign each student a project of their choice. One chose food photography, another street photography, and so on.

However, one lady told me she wanted to do “minimalist photography.” I said fine. Next time, she brought in examples she had found online. That got me suspicious: there was an array of geometrically clean images that spanned from landscape to architecture. How can we find common ground?