Christine Ozanne’s view (Letters, 23 March) that 80% of portraits look from the right to the left of the frame set me researching. An hour looking through the work of Freud, Gainsborough, Goya, Hockney and Ocean shows that 47% of the subjects look from the left, 34% out from the centre and just 19% from the right to the left. A lot of work has been done to determine how we scan a rectangular picture: in both portrait and landscape formats we start to look about one-third in from the left and one-third down from the top, precisely where the male face is generally placed on the sofa. Although Ozanne is right that our gaze tends to rest on the right of the frame, my work as a theatre designer makes me think that greater apparent power lies on the left but stronger opposition comes from the right. So maybe things are better than we think in TV’s sofa land?
David Cockayne
Lymm, Cheshire
• Christine Ozanne assumes that because we (ie westerners) read from left to right, the right-hand side of the screen “draws the eye more than the left”. However, website designers tend to work on the opposite assumption: that the top left-hand side of the home page is best the place for foregrounding key information because it is the one area guaranteed to be viewed by those who read from left to right. Less crucial information is more often presented sideways on the right of the screen, as well as lower down. This means – in sofa terms – that the male and not the female presenter’s head is generally in pole position, and that women should indeed continue to make a fuss about being so often on the right hand side of the TV screen.
Professor Jennifer Jenkins
Southampton
• I’m not too bothered about who sits on the left or right of the sofa. But I love watching the expression of the silent presenter as the two of them take turns to speak. Serious. Happy. Puzzled. Concerned…
Rob Watling
Radcliffe-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire
• Was I the only one beset by discomforting images after reading that “Frank Bough and Selina Scott changed positions all the time” in your piece on breakfast TV sofas (Talk of the week, 19 March)?
Tim Harrison
Surbiton
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