The photograph’s background may become the part future viewers care about most.

What a picture is of and what it turns out to hold are rarely the same. You aimed at a person; the frame also caught the wallpaper, the price on the sign, the shape of the cars, the way the street looked before it was rebuilt. Decades later those accidents carry the information, because the subject is remembered and the setting is not. Nobody can predict which incidental detail will matter, which is a good argument against cropping tightly.

When you take pictures this month, let a little of the room in. And go back through old ones looking past the faces at what else is there.