Out of the Landscape, into the Portrait

Toward a phenomenology of the phone.

Constable, “Wivenhoe Park, Essex”

“And the screen, as a faithful mirror, not only of conflicts emotional and tragic, but equally of conflicts psychological and optically spatial, must be an appropriate battleground for the skirmishes of both these optical-by-view, but profoundly psychological-by-meaning, spatial tendencies on the part of the spectator.” –Sergei Eisenstein

On September 17, 1930, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences held its most consequential meeting ever. Under the auspices of the academy’s technician branch, an elite group of filmmakers and engineers was called to Fox Hill Studios in Los Angeles to decide on a standardized shape for screens in movie theaters. It was a time of great experimentation in the dimensions of film images — Raoul Walsh was about to release his radically wide-screen The Big Trail, which, with an aspect ratio of 2.1:1, was more than twice as wide as it was high — and the academy’s decision would establish the frame for movie composition in the years to come.

The attendees were offered three aspect ratios to choose from, each a horizontal rectangle: 4:3, 5:3, 6:3. A horizontal screen was taken as a given for three reasons. The first was commercial. Existing theaters, built around a wide proscenium arch, had seating arrangements suited to the viewing of horizontal images. The second was cultural. Traditional landscape and narrative paintings were almost always horizontal in orientation; it was a framing that seemed natural for the telling of stories. The third was psychological. Because human vision is itself horizontal, a horizontal screen would feel congenial to eye and mind.

Thanks to the lateral placement of our two eyes in our head, we see the world in something like Cinemascope. Our horizontal field of vision spans about 180 degrees, while our vertical field is limited to about 130 degrees. The horizontal bias makes sense in evolutionary terms. The land presents a lot more opportunities and threats than the sky does, so a species like ours benefits from a broad “landscape” view. When we see a horizontally composed image, like a Constable landscape, it feels comfortable and calming to us because we recognize in it our own point of view. We know that this is how the world looks.

Now imagine being forced to wear blinders and suddenly seeing the world in a narrow “portrait” view. Not only would your new perspective be dangerous, limiting your ability to see your immediate surroundings. It would feel cramped, even claustrophobic. It’s no surprise that Stanley Kubrick, in filming the disturbing “Here’s Johnny” scene in The Shining, deliberately subverted the screen’s horizontality by framing Jack Nicholson vertically in a cracked doorway:

Still from Kubrick’s The Shining

Smartphones are blinders. They place us in Kubrick’s nightmare.

As a handheld device — what was once called a palmtop, to distinguish it from desktops and laptops — the mobile phone is designed to be held vertically, in portrait mode. It’s cumbersome to turn it sideways and look at it horizontally, in landscape mode. That’s why, according to studies, we look at our phone in portrait mode more than 90 percent of the time. Even when viewing horizontally composed photos and videos, we almost always keep the phone upright in our hand.

The phone screen’s narrow vertical format, with an aspect ratio of about 1:2, used to be controversial. For years after the iPhone appeared in 2007, people routinely complained that the small screen, much taller than it was wide, felt constricted and unnatural. Just ten years ago, when people started shooting videos in portrait format, traditionalists were outraged. “Holding your phone ‘the wrong way’ to shoot a video provokes surprisingly apoplectic reactions,” the New York Times reported in 2015.

But as the phone became our primary media and computing device, we all got used to it. We adapted our viewing habits to the phone’s design constraints, and media companies adapted their content to those constraints as well. The arrival of TikTok, the iron fist of verticality, sealed the deal. Visionwise, we’ve all gone vertical.

The aspect ratio of our lives has changed. By narrowing our field of view, cutting off our peripheral vision, the phone doesn’t just remove us from space and provoke a sense of claustrophobia. It isolates us. A horizontal frame places a person in a landscape. It emphasizes the ground in which the figure stands. It provides context. It tempers vanity and hubris. Verticality erases the landscape, the ground, the context. The figure stands alone, monumental in its solitary confinement.

Never in human history has there been an object so looked at as a smartphone. And yet, while we talk all the time about the content that flows through the phone, little research has been done on and little thought has been given to the psychological and ontological effects of the device’s unusual and unnatural form factor. Even as it dominates, and narrows, our field of vision, the phone as an object has become invisible to us. We need a phenomenology of the phone.