Diptychs and triptychs are a form of narrative representation and signification that has long been used in the history of art.
Triptychs typically originate from altarpieces and icons where you have a large central panel with the most important component and two panels on either side that, when folded over, combine their widths to cover the central panel. These tend to supplemental narrative or contextual information.
Below are some famous examples, ranging form the 1400’s to meditations on mortality from the 20th century’s Francis Bacon and Andy Warhol.
please click images to view
The reasons for using these panels may vary, from narrative (where we typically read the passage of time from left to right, to significance (where the central panel in a triptych is the most important, e.g. Jerome Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights) to thematic exploration (be it the exploration of narrative elements, or of formal elements, or even of mood elements (see examples below).
In modern usage, the diptych and triptych have often been used in a way that borrows from its rich history in religious signification in order to order to layer additional meaning or emotional significance to the narrative as well as in formally experimental ways that challenge the notion of linear reading from left to right, e.g. horizontal panels running from top to bottom, or panels of varying sizes placed along varying axes.
please click images to view
What this means is that you have the freedom to choose your own shapes, sizes and sequences for your diptych or triptych – however, there are certain constraints:
The first is that you have a limited amount of space in which to arrange your image(s): at max 1920px wide and max 1080px high, you do not want to waste too much space on borders or margins between the panels (this is one of the reasons contemporary photographers often abut their different panels right up against each other, with a hard, sudden, transition uninterrupted by a border or margin). Another facet of this constraint is that if you run the panels from top to bottom, you will tend to end up with really wide but narrow panels, in which case the contents need to be wisely selected towards this end, e.g. the juxtaposition of three different horizons.
The second constraint is that your choice of what comes in the first panel and what follows, or what sits in the dominant central panel and what on either side, can be key to the reading of your image (with diptychs being more democratic in the sense that the two panels tend to be in equal significance to each other with the flow of time not always being a component).
A third constrain is that you would want to have all three panels share the same height (if running horizontally) or width (if running vertically) so as not to squander your limited real estate, i.e. screen space.
How to set up your panels
Typically you would subtract all the different extraneous elements that make up width and height from your totally available amount of space, and then divide the remaining space by the amount of panels in order to get the final size.
So let’s say you want 10px around each image and you are doing a triptych of equal sized panels running horizontally:
- horizontally you have the following requirement: 10px border | panel | 10px border | panel | 10px border | panel | 10px border.Which means you subtract 30px from the total width of 1920px (which gives us 1880px), and divide this number by three to get three panels of equal width – which gives us 626.667px … how inconvenient!What do you do now? You can tinker with the widths of the borders until you come up with a round number, but my recommendation is to round down the width of panels 1 and 3 to 626, which leaves us 628px for the middle one, a difference of just two pixels.
- vertically is much easier to work out: 10px border | panel | 10px border.Which means that the height is 1080px – 20px (which gives us 1060px).
But what about when you want the central panel to be twice the width of the two outer panels?
Simple! The formula then becomes 10px border | 1/4x | 10px border | 1/2x | 10px border | 1/4x, where x is the total amount minus the borders (you will recall that is 1880px). So:
- panels one and three are 1880px divided by 4, i.e. 470px
- panel two is 1880px divided by 2, i.e. 940px
Again, you may end up with fractions in the results, in which case my recommendation is to round down the two outer panels.
You may also wish to experiment with more complex formulae, example the golden ration. For this you would need to do is adjust the formula above to accommodate the more complex relationship between the panels where the total width of the panels minus the borders would be equal to 1+1+1.62 (if a triptych), or even 1+1.62+(1.62 x 1.62) if you want each panel to increase by the golden ratio – good luck with that!