Some Thoughts on Framing

1
My most recent project of photographing the phone booths of our town compelled me to rethink the importance of framing. Phone booths are standardized, they all look the same (some are older, some are more colourful, but their shape is always identical). What distinguishes one from the other is its location. 

2
In one of my previous blips on framing I had talked about the importance of excluding visual information from a picture, of limiting it by cropping one's visual field. Now, when photographing phone booths, I'm confronted with the question: What do I want to include?

3
This picture from my father's archives is one of my dearest. I have always loved it, though I have no specific personal memories attached to it. There is something about it that fascinates me. It isn't the light, as I discovered when I converted it into a black and white image. The lighting is actually not good at all. All the things that seem to matter - and occupy the center or the image (the bus, the three kids) - are in the shade. 

4
It took me a while to understand that it is the things my Dad chose to include in the picture. The bus in itself is not very interesting, a curiosity at best. But the inclusion of the unpaved street, the house, the fence, the piece of land and the sky make it a perfect image of the world I grew up in.