A Small Batch Of Sky Above

The importance of white space

Sometimes the most important thing in a whole day is the rest we take between two deep breaths.

― Etty Hillesum

Dear Reader,

Last week, I finished one of my workshops that I teach quite frequently titled “Diptychs, Triptychs, and Beyond”. One thing I love most about teaching is that I am learning so much from everybody else. I mean it. Everyone’s work and perspective challenges and enriches my own work and perspective. I come away inspired every single time.

One thing that I talk about quite a bit in this particular workshop is the importance of space when it comes to pairing images, especially when adding text to two or more images. I don’t think the space necessarily needs to be white, but I do believe that white space can be powerful.

Here is why.

White space gives your eyes some rest. It gives you a moment to pause. It let’s you take a breath. It helps guide your eyes. It enables you to reflect, ponder, and process what is being expressed. It slows you down.

I am also drawn to the work of photographers who display small images with a large mat in a big frame. I have always loved that aesthetic.

When images are displayed this way it brings you automatically closer to the work. It pulls you in. It makes you take a step towards the images and spend time with them while paying attention to all the details. Thus, it also slows you down.

So, this week, I experimented by laying out images and text on white square-shaped pages.

I used old images, some taken not too long ago, some taken ten or fifteen years ago. I love picking images I have not given much attention to and then use them for a new project. I love using images that are hidden on my hard drive, some of them never shared with the world, and give them new meaning.

I created five white pages and then began laying out the images, playing with size and space and finally adding text.

The sentences I added come from various pages of the book “Etty Hillesum - An Interrupted Life”, one of my favorite memoirs. I have used a couple of pages from it for some erasure poetry before. This time I picked full sentences rather randomly, but selected the ones that seemed to pair well with my diptychs, and then, after trial and error and lots of experimentation with a variety of different layouts, this (visual) poem emerged.

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Etty Hillesum was a Dutch Jewish writer and is known as the adult counterpart to Anne Frank. Her diary and letters are all combined in the above-mentioned book to give the reader a full portrait of this remarkable woman.

Her words inspire all of us to celebrate life even in the midst of great challenges and devastating circumstances. Her writings reveal her awareness and compassion and are recognized as a beautiful resistance to the darkness all around her.

She died at Auschwitz in 1943 at the age of twenty-nine.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read my post today!

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