I’ve never been a cropper. Having grown up photographing with film and spending
years developing black and white photos in my university apartment in
Philadelphia, cropping has always felt like a hack, a lie. Of course, all photos
are lies, all photos are crops. The very definition of a photograph is to add
edges to the world, slice off some snippet, place it in a tiny box. Or, as the
late Chilean photographer Sergio Larrain put it, “The game [of photography] is
to organize the rectangle.”
I realize now that a “perfect” rectangle — pulled back so you see the edges of
the negative in the exposed print (to “prove” you haven’t cropped) — is a parlor
trick more than anything.
