For many years, photography publications have advised their readers to look for contrasting elements, and given useful advice on how to best arrange, or balance them in a composition; for instance, a lone vertical figure set against a horizontal expanse. These contrasts, I learned, are the opposites in reality, and in ourselves, and we have a hope, mostly unconscious, not just to arrange or balance them, but to make them one.

Eli Siegel describes, in Self and World, how the vertical and horizontal line stand for the two directions of self: the self alone and the self going out. "The self is indefinitely deep and indefinitely extensive," he writes. "It is vertical and horizontal. It is an ineluctable unity while it is constantly mobile."

I am sure the meaning of this affected me as I saw a little girl running along the shore who, without breaking stride, turned to smile at me. She is in motion like the tilted lines of land, ocean, and sky--and her vertical form is a means of joining all three.  Look at the crests of the waves and the foam as they break. Now, look at the folds of her dress, and the ruffles adorning her neck and wrist. See the similarity? Then, there is the straight cut of her bangs, which is in line with the distant horizon. The world has come to a point in an individual, and she has a mind with endless possibilities, expansive like the unbounded horizon.