Closing in

(Thank you all for your many comments on yesterday's blip. It was one of my most rewarding blips ever, I think, because your input added immensely to what I had written. You are priceless.)

1
When I bought my first camera after almost three decades and when it finally arrived by mail after two long weeks of a nerve-racking countdown, I was eager to just take my camera out on the streets, point it at anything and click. I soon discovered that simply squeezing things into a frame doesn't make for a good picture.
 
2
Peter von Matt, my professor for German literature at the University of Zurique, taught me a method that has been invaluable in many situations. It's called "close reading" and basically consists of paying attention to every word, every detail in a text. "Don't ignore a sentence or paragraph just because it doesn't interest you or makes you feel uncomfortable. Don't presume you know what the author means when you come upon a word you don't completely understand in a given context. Every word in a text has a meaning. If you want to understand a text, read the words and understand how and why they relate to one another. That's the essence of literature." The same, he said, applied to writing a text: Don't clutter it with words that don't add meaning to it.
 
3
I apply that same principle when I look at pictures taken by others. I look closely. And I tried to apply it when I began photographing myself.
 
4
Obviously, you don't always have the time to analyze every element of a picture before you take it. Sometimes you only have split-seconds to decide how you want to frame a scene. And sometimes, clutter can be an essential and meaningful part of a picture.
 
5
But looking at my world through the camera and trying to read what I saw taught me something important: I learned to reevaluate how I viewed the world I live in. My world was ugly because I presumed it to be ugly. And I presumed it to be ugly because I didn't pay attention. I ignored many of its "words". All this changed when my camera forced me to close in on them.
 

(Today's "uncluttered" blip shows little Alice Vitória with her mother Joyce.)