If it took you a moment to figure out what it is you’re looking at here – good, that is the idea.

Chicago photographer Kelli Taylor took this picture of a Kolo Newport photo album, a close-up shot from above, peering down at the top of the album’s pages and post-binding system. Not the angle one might normally expect to see of a photo album, but with her photographer’s eye, she recognized the interest and beauty of this particular view, composed her shot, focused, zoomed in tight, and clicked.

When we observe an object such as this with the naked eye -- not the photo of the object, but the object itself before us -- our sight naturally takes in the periphery and extraneous information. However, the photograph of the object forces a visual boundary -- a frame which permits only a limited portion of the object to be presented to us, thereby allowing us to see it anew.

A fan of Kolo albums for several years now, Kelli no doubt appreciated this Kolo Newport’s function, as well as its form. After all, she is the one who put together this wedding album (finished layouts to appear in a future Koloist post), so she understands the practical advantages that the Kolo Newport album’s post binding system offers:

For one, you can unscrew the hidden posts and remove the album covers. This allows you to lay out each page flat on a table while you work on them, if you wish. And to create a thicker photo album, you simply add more pages and use longer posts. And later – say, if someone gives you more photos that you'd like to show within the same album, you can take your album apart again, and add or rearrange pages. A well designed post-bound album allows for a lot of creative flexibility, so that after you've designed and assembled your photo album, you'll thoroughly enjoy the ingenuity behind your photographs, as well the book that showcases them.

While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see. ~ Dorothea Lange

If you want to hone your photographer's eye, try Jules Bianchi's abecedarium exercise here. For more Kelli Taylor posts on Koloist, go here. Check out her web site here.