Published: January 28, 2025 | Last Updated: May 28, 2025
Positive vs. negative space? explanation & examples
Positive space is the part of an image that contains the subject. Negative space is the area around and between subjects, including empty zones or less important elements. Artists and filmmakers use both to highlight focus, suggest emotion, and shape visual rhythm.
Every shot makes a choice about what to show, and what to leave out. That’s where positive and negative space come in. These are more than basic design terms. They’re how you frame attention, build tension, and control visual mood. Whether you’re painting, photographing, or composing a scene, understanding the push and pull between subject and void is everything.
What is Positive Space?
Positive space is the stuff your eye lands on first. It’s the object, the face, the figure, the tree, the weapon. It fills the frame with intention. In film, this usually means your character or focal object.
In The Graduate (1967), Benjamin Braddock is often framed at the center, but the frame closes in around him, doors, furniture, walls. He’s the positive space, yet so are the barriers pressing in. That tight spatial layering mirrors his mental unraveling.
Image Credit: United Artists.
What is Negative Space?
Negative space is what surrounds the subject. It can be empty, textured, blurry, or dark. It gives your positive space room to exist, and makes it pop. But it can also feel lonely, wide, or threatening depending on the context.
In Lost in Translation (2003, Focus Features), Charlotte often sits alone in wide frames. The hotel room isn’t just a setting, it’s negative space that swallows her. Her small figure framed against blankness tells us she feels adrift, even without a line of dialogue.
Negative Space Isn’t Always Empty
It’s a myth that negative space means blank space. It can have texture or detail, it just can’t distract from the subject. Think of a city skyline, a wallpapered wall, or a field of grass behind a portrait. The point is hierarchy: negative space supports, never competes.
No Country for Old Men (2007, Miramax) uses desert landscapes to build dread. A man walking across a wide horizon feels small. The space isn’t empty, it’s threatening. The lack of detail around him is what makes you tense.
How Balance Shapes Emotion
Too much positive space can make a frame feel crowded or chaotic. Too much negative space, and things can feel sparse, lonely, or overwhelming. That’s the power of balance, you control emotional tone with visual weight.
Artists often train by drawing only silhouettes or outlines. These contour studies help you notice how subjects relate to space. Cinematographers do this too, framing a subject as shape first, then layering in meaning. When you think in silhouettes, you focus on presence, not detail.
Blocking with Space Between Characters
Negative space can also live between characters. If you block a scene with two people placed far apart in a wide frame, that empty space becomes emotionally loaded. It reads as distance, conflict, or absence, long before anyone says a word.
Directors use this in dialogue scenes where the tension isn’t in what’s said but in what’s unsaid. The void between characters becomes the story.
Space That Points and Pulls
Negative space doesn’t just sit there, it leads the eye. In Star Wars: A New Hope (1977, Lucasfilm), Luke is framed at the edge of the screen, gazing into the twin sunset. The negative space leads outward, toward possibility. That emptiness becomes a metaphor for the future.
Negative space can also create tension through absence. It makes us wonder: what’s coming? What’s missing? In thriller and horror, this technique leaves room for something to emerge, or for nothing to happen at all, which is even more unnerving.
Genre and the Function of Space
Each genre uses space differently. Horror uses negative space to hide threats in plain sight. Westerns use it to show isolation. Sci-fi stretches it into the infinite to suggest power or insignificance. Slow cinema lingers in it, making us sit with the quiet discomfort.
Understanding these genre defaults lets you break them on purpose. A horror film that fills every frame might feel claustrophobic. A rom-com with too much negative space might feel emotionally distant. The space itself becomes part of the genre language.
Movement and Minimalism
In True Grit (2010, Paramount), silhouettes ride across the screen beneath a huge empty sky. They’re rushed, urgent, but still dwarfed by their surroundings. Negative space builds scale and danger, without a single close-up.
This minimalist approach is one of the cleanest ways to shoot isolation or grief. It removes clutter, tightens focus, and lets the composition do the talking. If the frame feels empty, it’s because the character is.
These Principles Started in Art
Long before film, artists were using positive and negative space to define mood. M.C. Escher’s Sky and Water I (1938) flips black birds into white fish, so the negative space of one becomes the positive of the other. That fluid shift forces us to rethink what the image is really about.
This is called figure-ground reversal, when the distinction between subject and background is blurred or flipped. Some experimental films use this too, where the void becomes the focus, and the subject is left vague or obscured. It’s disorienting, and that’s the point.
Classical painters like Vermeer also framed subjects with wide patches of empty wall. That negative space wasn’t filler. It created visual quiet, guiding the eye to what mattered most and giving the figure a kind of respectful space.
Space as Presence in East Asian Art
In Western art, negative space is often treated as absence. But in East Asian traditions, like Chinese ink painting or Japanese sumi-e, space is presence. It’s where the viewer breathes. The emptiness isn’t lack, it’s stillness, harmony, or mystery.
This mindset affects how directors like Yasujirō Ozu or Wong Kar-wai use space. A blank hallway or an off-centered room isn’t just lonely, it’s poetic. Their negative space doesn’t isolate. It listens.
Quick Framing Rule
Here’s a simple test: if your subject blends into the background or your frame feels too tight, add more negative space. Step back. Give them room. It’s an easy way to refocus the image and change tone, without touching lighting, color, or performance.
Summing Up
Positive space is the subject. Negative space is everything around it. But they aren’t opposites, they’re a pair. How you use them together controls focus, emotion, and rhythm. A tight shot can feel intense. A wide, empty shot can feel cold or free.
Whether you’re blocking a scene, shooting a portrait, or painting a figure, this balance gives you control. And when you learn to use that control, the frame starts working for you, not just for the sake of style, but for meaning.
Read Next: Want to sharpen your eye for visual composition?
Explore all visual composition articles on framing, balance, symmetry, and spatial design , from leading lines to negative space.
Or head back to the Cinematography section to browse more techniques on lenses, lighting, and camera movement.
