Notes on Photography

You cannot add to a photograph. You can only remove — step back, crop, wait. The subject either arrives in the frame or it does not. This is a useful discipline for someone who works in a medium where adding is always possible and often feels like progress.

The frame as argument

Every photograph makes an argument about what matters. The edges are a decision. What is excluded is as meaningful as what is included. I have tried to carry this into interface design: what does this screen not show? What has been left out, and is that omission intentional?

Light changes everything

The same street looks like a different place at 7am and at noon. Nothing has changed except the light. I think about this when I am designing in a fixed context — a screen, a deck, a brief — and the work feels flat. Often the problem is not the content but the conditions.