I was drawn to the first image by the way that Salvador Dali effectively used lines and how they were used to show visual movement and rhythm. The elephant’s trunk being extended forward shows the movement of the elephant going forward, from right to left across the scene. The elephant’s mouth, being open, helps to point the viewer’s eye down to the tigers if it isn’t already there. The tiger’s open mouth is at the first point we look at, as stated by the rule of thirds, and since it is leaping toward the second point, we naturally look towards the left, to the second tiger. That tiger is shaped in a sort of non-linear line, which points toward the linear line of the gun, which points to the lady. This textual reference leads the viewer to believe that the tiger is attacking the lady. The subtext we can get from this picture, however, is that the tigers are overcoming being hunters’ prey and becoming the hunters themselves, accentuated by the fish swallowing the tiger on the left. This is a contrast of what we consider the norm, as tigers eat fish, and humans hunt tigers.
I took out that text and subtext when I cropped the photo, though. I went down to just the tigers, to create an affinity to what we believe to be normal. In Dali’s original, he framed it the way he did to create something that does not agree with the regular way of thinking, with the tigers being attacked by their prey and, in turn, attacking that which hunts them as prey. In my “zoomed in” picture, one sees just two regular old tigers. One is roaring, which you see first as your eye goes through the points of the rule of thirds. The next thing you see is the other tiger pouncing, as it would on its prey. You don’t see the prey, so you just go with what you know and assume that it’s about to catch a deer for dinner; you don’t see what is outside of the norm.
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