The Mediterranean at Shutter Height

The shutter looks particularly good when painted blue. Green works too. Against a pale wall, either can persuade a photographer to stop in the middle of a lane and become a minor obstruction.

It is worth remembering, while composing the picture, that the shutter has a job.

Across parts of the Mediterranean, the details visitors admire are often responses to the business of living in a place: controlling light, making shade, negotiating a slope, using a limited space. Their beauty need not be separated from their usefulness.

A shutter changes a room. Open, it admits the street and the day. Closed, it gives the building a different face. The person passing outside sees a colour and a pleasing rectangle; the person inside may simply want less sun on the table.

This difference in purpose gives a familiar travel image some depth. A row of houses becomes more than an arrangement of surfaces. Each entrance and window suggests decisions being made beyond the photographer's knowledge.

There is restraint required here. A closed shutter does not tell us whether anyone is home. An empty lane does not prove that a town has escaped modern life. Washing, satellite dishes, parked vehicles and cables are not errors in an otherwise timeless scene. They belong to the place as much as the stone.

Keep some of them in the frame.

A photograph that removes every contemporary inconvenience can produce a settlement that seems designed entirely for visitors. A wider composition restores the awkward details through which a street begins to feel usable: the bin, the number on a door, the place where a vehicle has just enough room to pass.

The blue shutter remains beautiful. It simply ceases to carry the impossible burden of representing an untouched way of life.

Then someone needs the lane. The photographer steps aside. The building continues doing what it was doing before it became a picture: providing a place for someone to be indoors.