Framed

1
When I joined the blipcommunity shortly after taking up photography I soon began to feel uncomfortable. I'd wake up every morning and look at all those beautiful photographs that blippers all around the world were taking of their stunning locations. There were all those majestic mountains, mystical fields and sunsets at the beach of some hidden paradise. But I lived in what I believed to be one of the ugliest cities of my country. What could I share that would be of interest to people blessed by the beauty that surrounded them? When I shared this sentiment with my friends on blipfoto, they all told me in unison: You can find beauty everywhere.
 
2
I had heard it before, of course. But I had always dismissed it as a sentimental commonplace, as empty words we use to comfort ourselves in the misery of our existence. But now with my camera in hands and eager to use it, I had no other option than to rethink my convictions and at least consider the possibility that there was some truth to it. My first thought and starting point was: If I wasn't seeing beauty around me, there was something wrong with the way I looked at my life.
 
3
Every morning, I open my eyes to an excess of visual information. The sunlight breaking in through the curtains, a heap of dog hair on the floor, my sleeping wife at my side, a stain on the wall, the TV we didn't turn off the night before because we both fell asleep while watching the news or some other late night show. Too much to take in, too much to process it all. So I concentrate on the things that are essential to navigate my world: the countless potholes in the streets, the chaotic traffic, broken pipes, people jumping out on the street from behind a bus, black vultures feasting on trash bags, the labyrinth of a young city that grew rapidly without adequate planning.
 
4
Thinking back on the years I spent in Switzerland, I believe the same principle applies to places we call beautiful. Visual information is equally excessive in these places, the difference being that the relevant things you have to keep an eye on are, well - beautiful: the slippery, snow-covered streets in winter, the ravine that opens up before your feet during a hike in the mountains.
 
5  
This is, of course, a very simplistic and incomplete definition of a beautiful place. But it led to my first essential discovery through photography: As soon as I lifted the camera to my eye and peeped through the viewfinder, I saw a world that was reduced to a small window that still offered plenty of sometimes still chaotic visual information - but everything outside that frame ceased to exist, allowing me to take in much more than I was able to with unlimited vision.
 
6
I continued to see the muddy potholes, but looking through the lens of my camera I now also saw the sky reflected in the mud. The frame cropped the ugly scenery at the margins of the highway that cuts through our town to show me the horse protecting itself from the heat of the sun in the shade of a tree.
 

(The extra shows the same scene in wide angle. The horse almost disappears in its surroundings.)