FICTION A Short Lesson in Photo Composition Andrew Rudd I have been in New Herald for four days, walking every morning, and every morning a different route. The first morning I went up past Geurke's; the second, down and around the back pasture of Lyons, where the creek runs parallel to the road, and today and yesterday it was up and over the back eighty, and I ended by the great barn. I take my camera everywhere, and I have been trying to take pictures the way that my great aunt, Nanny, did when she took her walks through and around New Herald. One of my wife's colleagues asked me to make a presentation on photography in her art class when we return to Hatboro, Pennsylvania. Ideas for this presentation stirred in my mind for most of our trip here, and finally last night I settled on what I will share. High school students , I have decided, have most of their life to learn about aperture, setting, light meters, and the timing of a darkroom. What they need more than anything is an understanding of photo composition. When I speak of photo composition, I am rarely speaking of interior framing devices, and triangular arrangements of subjects. Photo composition is the relationship that a small square or rectangular piece of paper has with life. A well-taken picture is a small mirror of the perspective of the photographer, the unique and clear vision of one person. When viewed this way, taking pictures is not so much an art as a grave responsibility. It was in this sense that Nanny Patterson profoundly influenced my vision of the world, and taught me what it is that I know about photography. She said to me, "When you understand what your pictures are of and about, then you will understand your world in a way that you could otherwise not." The three rules that she gave me were never spoken; instead they were principles that I learned as I paged through and through her piles of photo albums. Andrew Rudd lives in Michigan. He is working toward agraduate degree at Andrews University in Michigan, and writes in his spare time. 58 1. The more you have your camera, the more ofthe world you will see. To the rest of the family, Nanny and her camera were a bit of a joke. The two were seldom seen separate and the jokes ran along the lines of whether or not Nanny took the camera to bed with her, or into the bathroom; the reality was that Nanny simply got all the best pictures. When Grandma spilled Thanksgiving gravy on the tablecloth, two cousins , and Uncle Dale's new girlfriend, three pictures from the episode ended up in the pages of her albums. Better than the formal and posed pictures of my parents' wedding day is the one that catches my mother and her mother exchanging last-minute arguments in the church basement . The term "selective focus" would fall outside of Nanny's vocabulary, but the concept is solidly present in several of her best pictures. My favorite example is one of my father just turned fifteen, in the kitchen with his mother and father. My father is sitting in the foreground looking at the table and ignoring his mother, who is standing at his right shoulder pulling a dishrag with both hands, and speaking angrily to him. His father—my grandfather—is standing in the doorway at the far end of the room. His image is blurred as if in that moment he only blended into the kitchen and the doorway he leaned against holding his mug of coffee. "What are you taking pictures of now?" My grandmother snapped at Nanny, and then as if there were no answer she turned to her husband . "Wyand? Aren't you going to say anything to your son?" Instead his father stepped down out of the doorway and into the garage as if he hadn't heard her at all. My father looked over his shoulder when he heard the wooden-framed screen door explode closed, shook his head, pushed his chair back and across the wooden floor...